Layering styles/templates?

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, all,

Though I understand some about Global templates and add-ins, and how you can
change the association of a document to a template, I'm stuck on this one.
Is it possible to layer styles from different templates together without
changing the global settings for each user? That is, have a default
template and then layer styles from additional templates into it, so you
could easily attach and detach additional chunks of style codes depending on
your situation?

The problem we're trying to solve is this: we want a corporate document
template that has an attractive cover sheet and a base set of style codes.
However, one size does not necessarily fit all. Accounting has additional
styles codes they need, and Web designers use additional style codes for
their design documents. So, we'd like the base template to be the same but
allow people to layer their own style codes into it, without copying them in
permanently (in case the base template changes in the future).

Any ideas about how we could do this?

Thanks--

Susan

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Susan

You might be able to achieve some of what you want by using the 'model
document' approach. You could allow each department to make model documents
(.doc files) based on the standard template (.dot) and thus starting with
the base styles and layout. They could make style additions in these
documents without affecting the template.

Save the model documents in subfolders of the workgroup templates directory
if you want company-wide sharing, or else show the departments how to add
shortcut to their folder(s) of model documents into their users' user
templates directory. The model documents can then be used just like
templates.

Because the model documents and new documents based upon them are all
attached to the corporate template, it would be possible to update styles in
any of the documents by using the Tools > Templates and Add-ins
'Automatically update styles' facility. However, since it is bad practice to
leave this on (and users can't be trusted to turn it off) it's probably
better to provide a custom macro to do the update on document open, if you
really must update styles. If you use a property in the template to indicate
template version, it is possible to do a test on this (against the same
property in the derived documents) and do the update only if different
(update code must also update property to match, in this case).

Hope this is some food for thought, anyway

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Margaret,

Definitely food for thought; thank you. We don't have any corporate
"shares", so the automatically update option won't be an issue for us. We'd
need to rely on a manual update of some kind, or a user-initiated macro
update...but that's definitely good information to start us off with.

Thanks for the reply--