Styles Primer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jim Speiser
  • Start date Start date
J

Jim Speiser

Can someone please point me to a decent tutorial on the use of styles? I
can see their usefulness, but every time I think I've got the hang of it,
something unexpected occurs. Thanks for any help. I checked on the MVP
site, and there doesn't seem to be an FAQ on this subject, even though they
claim that Styles is the most powerful feature in Word.

==JJS==
 
Very well written, Shauna, but a little too basic for my needs. Perhaps I
should just ask some questions here.

My current problem is, changing a user-defined style in the normal.dot
template. I have a style called Highlighted, which I have decided to change
from a paragraph style to a character style. I have tried to do this two
ways. First, I tried to copy the style from a document that I used it in
over to the normal.dot template using the Styles Organizer. It did not
"take"; subsequent documents that I create still have the old definition of
"Highlighted". Then I tried opening a blank document and changing the style
in there, then tried to save it as a Document Template File, overwriting
normal.dot. Apparently you can't overwrite normal.dot. You also can't
directly edit a template (like you could in WordPerfect...<sigh>) So how do
you make changes to the styles in normal.dot?

==JJS==
 
Disregard previous. Apparently you CAN overwrite normal.dot, if you open it
directly. For some reason I thought this was a no-no. I succeeded in making
the change. Still not sure why the other methods didn't work, though...

==JJS==
 
Hi Jim

I'm glad you got it to work. Just for the record, you can open any
template for editing with File > Open. What you *can't* do is directly
open a template with File > New. When you use File > New, Word creates a
new document based on the template.

From Windows Explorer, to open a template for editing, right-click and
choose Open. If you just double-click, Windows invokes the default
action, which is New, and which will create a new document based on that
template.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
Melbourne, Australia
 
Note also that when you make changes in styles in a document, the changes
apply to that document only unless you write the change back to the template
by checking the "Add to template" box.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Hi, Jim,

One more "for the record" item:

In another branch of this thread you wrote...
My current problem is, changing a user-defined style in the normal.dot
template. I have a style called Highlighted, which I have decided to change
from a paragraph style to a character style. ...
First, I tried to copy the style from a document that I used it in
over to the normal.dot template using the Styles Organizer. It did not
"take"; subsequent documents that I create still have the old definition of
"Highlighted".
Click to expand...

I suspect that you didn't *delete* the paragraph style from Normal.dot
before you tried to use the Organizer. If you had, it would have
worked. Note that you can't delete the built-in styles, but you can
delete user-defined ones. However, that action would change all
paragraphs formatted with that style to Normal style. :-(

By design, Word won't overwrite a paragraph style in one template with
a character style of the same name from another template. To
overwrite, they would both have to be the same kind of style.
 
AHA! THAT'S why it didn't work! Thanks!

Jay Freedman said:
Hi, Jim,

One more "for the record" item:

In another branch of this thread you wrote...


I suspect that you didn't *delete* the paragraph style from Normal.dot
before you tried to use the Organizer. If you had, it would have
worked. Note that you can't delete the built-in styles, but you can
delete user-defined ones. However, that action would change all
paragraphs formatted with that style to Normal style. :-(

By design, Word won't overwrite a paragraph style in one template with
a character style of the same name from another template. To
overwrite, they would both have to be the same kind of style.
Click to expand...
 
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