combining Word documents

[Chip Orange]

Our agency has recently moved from WordPerfect 9 to Word 2002. Many of our
documents have very strict formatting requirements and we are setting up
templates with styles to accomodate that. Our thought was to use Word's
built-in styles whenever possible.

However, often these documents may need to be combined with attachments that
have very dissimilar formatting. A heading 1 style in one document has
different settings than the heading 1 style in another document and so
bringing the documents together seems problematic, no matter what paste
options we use. One post suggested renaming the styles in document 2, but
you cannot rename the built-in styles...it only assigns aliases.

We then considered using our own styles based on Word's built-in styles so
they could be named differently in our different templates, but Shauna
Kelley's article on using Word's built-in styles indicated that Word treats
its own styles differently than user-created ones.



1. What is the best way to set up templates for documents which will need to
be combined later, which have different formats and which need to use
built-in styles?

2. There will also be documents that must be combined, in which users did
not follow best practices, i.e., there will be plenty of direct formatting
in addition to the styles. Is there any way to preserve the formatting when
we need to combine documents at the 11th hour?



We have also told them not to use the master document feature.



thanks for any suggestions.



Chip

 

[Rob Schneider]

Do you really need to bring all the doc's together? Use Word to
write/edit them based on standard style sheets, but use Adobe Acrobat to
assemble "publishable" final documents (base doc + attachments) to be
released to customers.

Keep it simple.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Chip Orange]

Yes, we do, we must make the final document available to others as a single
Word document.

thanks for your response.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Chip,

Perhaps something from
http://www.google.com/[email protected]
might help (insert as Word doc object, or rename styles with a macro).

If you do use the macro, make a backup first!

Also, a document with two sets of styles gets pretty hard to manage, so I
wouldn't really recommend the method for general use.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Chip Orange]

thanks for your response.

We did try the word object method, and while I don't remember the problems
we encountered, we didn't find it a workable method.

As for renaming the built-in styles with a macro, this looks intreaguing
(since I didn't know it could be done), but Shauna Kelly has an article on
her web site about all the things in Word that break when you don't use the
built-in styles, but use custom ones defined on them instead. I didn't
check them all out, but I did check out the html generation, and indeed, if
the style is not named "heading1" Word will not generate the <h1> tag.

Lastly, we were hoping for a set of easy to use instructions we could write
up and pass on to our users, who generally have had only a one-day class in
the use of Word. They often are involved in projects involving colaborative
authorship of an eventual large document, and right now we're being flooded
with support calls for help when they go to assemble it and it's a disaster.
Since we've told them explicitly not to use the Word master document
feature, they hold us (the IT shop) a little responsible for their
difficulties.

I have to say that in some cases the production of these compound documents
is so routine that we've attempted to write VBA code and specialized
templates to help them out, and I'm having a great deal of difficulty
bringing text in from one document and placing it properly into another
(without say, loosing the strikethrough attribute, just my latest headache).

Since we're all WordPerfect refugees, I thought it's just that none of us
understands Word well enough to do a proper job of it, that's why I'm asking
here. The suggestions such as yours are all appreciated, and quite
creative, but not yet quite enough to let me assemble a large document from
many smaller ones. (and yes, I am required to produce a single large Word
document at the end).


thanks again,

Chip

 

[Rob Schneider]

Still recommend that you check, just to make sure, that it is really
required to create DOC files as the deliverable. So much easier and less
costly to produce final deliverables like this in Adobe PDF, given the
type of complexities you are facing. My experience is that if you ask
the question in a 'designed' way you'll get to the bottom of the
business need which may not be "we need a Word DOC". Sometimes people
get hung up on something that isn't worth getting hung up on.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Jean-Guy Marcil]

Bonjour,

Dans son message, < Chip Orange > écrivait :
In this message, < Chip Orange > wrote:

|| thanks for your response.
||
|| We did try the word object method, and while I don't remember the
problems
|| we encountered, we didn't find it a workable method.
||
|| As for renaming the built-in styles with a macro, this looks intreaguing
|| (since I didn't know it could be done), but Shauna Kelly has an article
on
|| her web site about all the things in Word that break when you don't use
the
|| built-in styles, but use custom ones defined on them instead. I didn't
|| check them all out, but I did check out the html generation, and indeed,
if
|| the style is not named "heading1" Word will not generate the <h1> tag.
||
|| Lastly, we were hoping for a set of easy to use instructions we could
write
|| up and pass on to our users, who generally have had only a one-day class
in
|| the use of Word. They often are involved in projects involving
colaborative
|| authorship of an eventual large document, and right now we're being
flooded
|| with support calls for help when they go to assemble it and it's a
disaster.
|| Since we've told them explicitly not to use the Word master document
|| feature, they hold us (the IT shop) a little responsible for their
|| difficulties.
||
|| I have to say that in some cases the production of these compound
documents
|| is so routine that we've attempted to write VBA code and specialized
|| templates to help them out, and I'm having a great deal of difficulty
|| bringing text in from one document and placing it properly into another
|| (without say, loosing the strikethrough attribute, just my latest
headache).
||
|| Since we're all WordPerfect refugees, I thought it's just that none of us
|| understands Word well enough to do a proper job of it, that's why I'm
asking
|| here. The suggestions such as yours are all appreciated, and quite
|| creative, but not yet quite enough to let me assemble a large document
from
|| many smaller ones. (and yes, I am required to produce a single large
Word
|| document at the end).
||
||

It can be done. I have done something similar for a client. They have a
dozen authors who write a bunch of small independent documents (lessons,
examples, exercises, references, etc. It is a training department in a large
company). But eventually a training manual has to put together from these
smaller documents. A small documents may be used in many training manual.

Here are a few things to consider.

Make a global template for all autotexts and a customized toolbar.

Have a template used only to bring the pieces together.

When bringing documents in the large final one, makes sure you have code
that will preserve the header/footers, IOW, the section breaks.

Make sure all templates share the same styles.
It does not matter how you look at it, I do not think you will be ever
successful if you allow templates that share the same style names, but that
have different definitions. A compromise must be made on that point. OTOH,
manual formatting should be preserved when combining documents.

You are also going to have to find a way to handle paragraph numbering. If a
list in the style "Number1" in Document 1 finishes at 6, will a list in
Document 2 that also uses the style named "Number1" start at 7 or restart at
1 as it was intended by the author?

Watch out for table styles. Again, their definitions should be the same in
all templates.

REF and SEQ fields are very handy in such a context.

There is more, but these are the major points I remember off the top of my
head right now.

Good luck.

--
Salut!
_______________________________________
Jean-Guy Marcil - Word MVP
(e-mail address removed)
Word MVP site: http://www.word.mvps.org

 

[Klaus Linke]

As for renaming the built-in styles with a macro, this looks intreaguing

(since I didn't know it could be done), but Shauna Kelly has an article on
her web site about all the things in Word that break when you don't use the
built-in styles, but use custom ones defined on them instead. [...]

Well, you can't have both: Two sets of heading styles with different
formatting *and* only use the built-in heading styles <g>

In addition to the advice you got from the others:

It's much, much easier to prepare *one* proper template for all authors in
advance, then to combine docs based on different templates.
If different authors need to use different sets of styles in the same
(assembled) document, you could hide some sets of styles that are in the
template for some of the users.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Chip Orange]

Yes, thank you, we too had come to the conclusion that section breaks were
an absolute minimum to start with. I've thought about creating a master
document to handle the assembly on those ocasions where no more editing was
going to be necessary, am still considering that approach; sometimes
however, at the time of combination, we know that the resultant document
will still continue to be edited, so that doesn't sound like a good approach
in that case.


Chip