Standard document layout

[Guest]

Hello,
I have been tasked with taking old documents and bringing them into the
current document standards. These documents are everything from typewritten
papers that I am using OCR software to save myself the typing, to relatively
recent documents that have been written in Word, but the skill of the person
writing the report varies widely, from people who will use macros to people
who will bend the document any way they can tosee it the wayy they want.
Would creating a document templete, that has the standard information like
heading layouts and section breaks be the best way to go to save us some time
as we bring these documents into the standard layout? It is extremely
frustrating to try and "fix" the original document and have strange things
like page numbering and TOC issues arising over and over again. I was
thinking by clearing all the formatting in the source document, and then
copying and pasting into the standard template layout, we could make the
documents all look and behave the same way.

Does this sound like the best way to go about this? I am dealing with
100+ documents to bring up to date.
Thanks

 

[Guest]

Hi Jacky,

Yes, using a template is the best way to update your documents. The best
procedure to follow, however, is not to copy and paste the text into the
template file.

When you have the text in Word, you can apply a template to that existing
file. Please follow this link that will explain how to do that.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052543261033.aspx

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Close. Yes use a template.
Create a new document based on the template and paste the contents into it.
Then go through and apply your styles.

Attaching a template to an existing document gives you access to styles and
macros, but does not give you formatting / headers, etc. from the template.

You may have best luck converting your old documents to plain text files
because document conversion and OCR make editing very difficult.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide


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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This can update styles but not layout. See
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/attachtemplate/index.html

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Thanks, but I do not understand if I clear all the formatting from the
document, how is Word going to know where to create paragrahs and put things
in different sections if I am just changing a templete?

 

[Guest]

Hi Jacky,

You are going to have different outcomes for the different documents that
you apply the template to. This is unavoidable and is based on the current
format of the document.

You will not necessarily have to clear the formatting for every document, as
applying the new template to it will update the formatting to the styles that
you want.

There are some cases where you will have to clear the formatting first
depending on the outcome of applying a new template.

Unfortunately, applying a new template will not always do a perfect job, and
in those cases you might have to do some things manually (such as ensuring
the paragraphs are correct, etc.)