Startup Templates and Supplemental Styles

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jose
  • Start date Start date
J

Jose

I've discovered some great potential for having certain
customizations in a startup template that supplements normal.dot, but
I've come across a mystery. I wanted to put some styles in my
supplemental startup template so that a new blank document would have
them available even if they were not part of normal.dot. When I open
up the supplemental startup template, they're there. But when I fire
up Word, those styles are not part of a new blank document.

I'm partly curious about why they're not there. More so, however,
I'm wondering how I do what I'm trying to do: to have some
customized styles available to all new blank documents *without*
making those styles part of normal.dot.
 
The styles available to a document are precisely those contained in the
template on which the document is based. I assume by 'supplemental start-up
template' you mean a template loaded as an add-in: the styles in an add-in
are not available to your document because your new blank document is not
based on it.

The usual and simple method for providing styles is to base your documents
on a template that contains them. This is the way Word is designed to
operate; in general, applications such as you are developing are reliable
more or less in proportion to the extent you work with rather than against
Word's standard mode of operation.

You can also put styles into a document through code, either creating them
on the fly or by automating the organizer to copy them from another template
or document. This would make all your documents larger.

If you want them always to be available, what's wrong with putting them in
normal.dot?
 
If you want [other styles] always to be available, what's
wrong with putting them in normal.dot?
Click to expand...

The idea I was working on was to preserve normal.dot in its out-of-
the-box state, and to use startup templates for customization. Might
not be worth it, though. Your thoughts on that?
 
You've discovered that styles are not inherited automatically from Add-Ins.
Thank the designers for that, I do, now that I've thought through the
implications. I regularly have 15 or more Add-Ins loaded and I don't want to
have to try to sort through them trying to have the styles in all of them
match each other (or at least the styles with the same names).

Most of your styles should be in your document templates rather than in
globals. That said, I do have style sets that I like to regularly use and I
would like to be able to simply update one template and have them available
in either a group of other templates or all of my templates. This can be
done, but not as easily as adding a toolbar to a global template to have it
show up in all your documents...

Probably the best way is to write your styles using macros and use the
macros (in a global template) to generate them in a new document. I'm not
good at this and so don't use this method, yet. Instead, I have the styles
in either the global template or some other document or template stored in a
standard known location. I have macros that copy those styles using the
OrganizerCopy method into new or existing documents.

For groups of templates, I have a base template that contains the styles
(and also basic headers and footers and AutoText). That template has a
document variable "basename" which is the name of the template. Derivative
templates are created by opening that base template and using SaveAs to
create new templates. The document variable in the derivative templates
remains the same, the name of the base template. The AutoNew macro checks
the name of the attached template against the name stored in the variable.
If it is different, the final step in the autonew macro attaches the base
template to the new document updating the styles. (You could switch back to
the old template after that, not updating, if you wanted to.) It then breaks
the auto-update link.

It is possible to have multiple style sets of base and derivative templates
this way. Hope this helps.
--

Charles Kenyon

See the MVP FAQ: <URL: http://www.mvps.org/word/> which is awesome!
--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.
 
It is possible to have multiple style sets of base and
derivative templates this way. Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

Yikes. If I understood it better, I think it would help. This
weekend I will try to figure out the document variable/template group
approach you described. I may post back here if I have questions.
For the moment, though, thanks for what is likely to be very helpful
info.

Jose
 
Hi Jose

Another approach you can use for base and derived templates is to make each
base a .dot file and the derived templates .doc files (created from the
base) but store them in the templates folder. You can then File > New from
the .docs, and the new documents will automatically be attached to the base.

This is useful where you have umpteen different form letters, for instance,
which share styles and other customizations (stored in the myletter.dot) but
have different initial content (stored in the .docs).
 
Hi Margaret,

This doesn't take care of non-style issues such as a change in letterhead,
though. (These issues weren't something Jose was looking for, anyway.)
Otherwise, very good idea. Simpler than using a document variable since the
code can simply use the attached template for getting the non-style items
from the original template.

--

Charles Kenyon

See the MVP FAQ: <URL: http://www.mvps.org/word/> which is awesome!
--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.
 
Back
Top