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Help me with MS Word styles
Armando:
I hate styles in Word -- they're not stable --> they tend to change (enough so that I've had to put many templates as Read Only!). That's it. I just needed to say it.
AndyM:
I hate styles in Word -- they're not stable --> they tend to change (enough so that I've had to put many templates as Read Only!). That's it. I just needed to say it.
-Armando (October 25, 2008, 11:31 PM)
--- End quote ---
That's never happened to me. There are commands that will update a style - do you have a hotkey assigned to one that you hit by accident?
Word without styles would be only half as useful for me in terms of automation and consistency.
Armando:
Problems do happen with styles -- and yes, the user is usually involved, as usual with computers, but..
Styles, numbering etc. are tied together in ways that are often hard to see clearly : try deleting a custom style that was part of an outline numbering scheme you forgot about, and bye bye numbering scheme. Word creates so many styles by itself and it's annoying... It's confusing. I don't have the time to explain how my last document (which was an assignment) got some titles bolded" without my explicit permission, and how my default style when writing emails defaults to a weird indented style (and tab stop), but it happens. And I know I've spent countless hours trying to fix "broken" styles and documents (with the documentation) to know that styles features are not optimally designed (if not bugs)...
Of course, most often, stuff/styles work. What drives me crazy is when it doesn't want to work. properly and takes hours of my time.
superboyac:
I don't mean to be rude, but...
Instead of telling me HOW to do this stuff or where to find information about it, could someone please instead just give me some templates that already have a bunch of styles for headings, numbering, bullets, etc. already customized nicely?
With the millions of Word users, there have to be some good templates out there. But I can't find any on Google. People have written long instructions and articles about how to do it, and how to understand it correctly. But can you just provide the end result please?? I really don't care if I understand it or not, I just want something that works and that someone has already put in the time to create.
I can't tell if the templates aren't available because people don't want to share their work, or if nobody has actually done it, yet they just like to explain how it can be done. The latter is a common thing i run into in work situations where you are trying to get something done. People talk and talk, yap yap yap, forever like they know everything about everything. But when it comes to actually DOING something, they seem to have a hard time with it.
kfitting:
This is a good article about templates. You can download the article with it's associated template... dont know that it has outline/numbering though. But it's a good article nonetheless. I think one reason not many people put their templates up is because they are "generally specific," meaning specific companies create specific templates for general documents.
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm
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