Automatically updates document styles--ever a best practice?

[bdog_jdog]

Hi All,
We recently came across a set of documents that were set to
automatically update document styles. I've always read on this forum
and pretty much everywhere else that you don't want to have this option
checked.

But, in seeing hundreds of documents having this option set, I thought,
"maybe I'm missing something here". And, then, thinking as a web
developer which I am, thinking of external style sheets and server side
includes and things--it sounds great to have a scenario where the
tightly permissioned template can be modified and documents attached to
the template are then modified. A couple of big IF's in the scenario of
course, including users applying direct formatting and copy/paste
without paste special and etc.

So, I've read about all the problems "Automatically updates document
styles" can cause--bullets and numbering and such, but is it ever a
best practice to use that option, and keep it on, for sets of
documents?

thanks all.
Ben

 

[Jezebel]

Leaving that option on is OK only if the document formatting is *extremely*
disciplined -- ie with no manual formatting applied. This is very rarely
the case: beginners just aren't that well-behaved, and for experienced users
there is always scope for typographic improvement (a little more space here,
force a page-break there, etc).

Of course there are exceptions: there are documents constructed with a very
restricted set of styles (like the early HTML documents, with nothing but
headings, body text, and lists; and documents that are machine-generated
(database output, XSLT conversions, etc). For these, forced reversion to
style is entirely reasonable.