Heading styles based on upper-level heading?

[PRR]

I read at a Word MVP site, the following in an article on creating a
template (the link here is http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm
; you have to scroll down and click on the "Styles" link to get to the
page that has the quotation):

Using Format/Style you customise each of the Heading styles to the
formatting you want. Remember to check the “Add to Template” box for
each style, otherwise Word will not write your changes back to the
template. This does not matter if you have the template open as a
document as you do now, but it is critical later when you are updating
the template while working on a document that is attached to it.

Go through the Heading styles Heading 2 to heading 9 and base each
lower number on the one above it in the hierarchy.

Base Heading 1 itself on “No style”. This creates a break in the
inheritance list that isolates the Heading styles as a group.

So the author is saying that one should NOT base heading styles on the
normal style, then. I'm not sure that I understand why--"isolates the
Heading styles as a group" seems to be the reason, although I'm not
sure of the benefit of that. Can someone explain this to me?

Also, given that I've been having numerous problems over the past
several months with modified heading styles losing their
modifications, would this help? I don't think I have ever changed the
"based on" option when I have changed my heading styles.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Quoting from
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styles/HowStylesCascade.html:

"It's a good idea to set up your heading styles so that Heading 2 is
based on Heading 1, Heading 3 is based on Heading 2, and so on. This
allows you to make radical changes to your document very easily.

If you're going to do this, you need to base Heading 1 on "No Style"
because Word has 9 levels of Headings, and only accepts 9 generations
of styles. I actually like this "feature", because it completely
separates the formatting of the headings and the body text. So I can
make a change to all the headings easily without affecting any body
text, and vice versa."

It's well worth reading the rest of that article.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.