linked documents

[Guest]

I began with an original document, then added links to other documents (all
linked documents are templates formatted the same by me) by opening the
secondary documents, SELECT ALL and COPY, then pasted the clipboard into the
original document PASTE SPECIAL - HTML - PASTE LINK. I have many Links now in
my original, but some (very sporadic) font formatting is lost (sometimes just
part of a sentence) and reverts to "Normal" (Arial 10) in the original
document when the linked document is formatted Arial 12, Bold. I open the
linked document from the original (LINKS - EDIT or OPEN LINK) to check the
formatting and it is OK in the linked document. If I click on PRESERVE
FORMATTING in the LINKS dialog box, the problem gets worse. I am running WORD
2003 on XP.

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?TUJyZXdlcg==?=,

I began with an original document, then added links to other documents (all
linked documents are templates formatted the same by me) by opening the
secondary documents, SELECT ALL and COPY, then pasted the clipboard into the
original document PASTE SPECIAL - HTML - PASTE LINK. I have many Links now in
my original, but some (very sporadic) font formatting is lost (sometimes just
part of a sentence) and reverts to "Normal" (Arial 10) in the original
document when the linked document is formatted Arial 12, Bold. I open the
linked document from the original (LINKS - EDIT or OPEN LINK) to check the
formatting and it is OK in the linked document. If I click on PRESERVE
FORMATTING in the LINKS dialog box, the problem gets worse. I am running WORD
2003 on XP.

There's really no satisfactory way to control the formatting that comes across
when you do this, except that you definitely should create a STYLE (either
paragraph or character, as appropriate) for every type of formatting you use in
the "source" documents (the ones you're copying from). And it's important that
these style names are NOT present in the target document (the one you're pasting
the links into). If text is formatted with the same style, Word has a tendency
to apply the style definition in the TARGET document, overriding what's coming
in from the source. Unique style names are the best and most reliable way to
control this.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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