Style sheet creation and management utility

[Greg Huntzinger]

I hope I have the right newsgroup here.

I would like to know if anyone knows of a utility that is actually
desgined to create and edit Word styles and style sheets? I need to
create a new template and edit another. The thought of hitting
Format, Style about a million times has made the project easy to
ignore. It seems like there should already be a utility that is
really desgined to do this that would make it possible to put a
serious template together in a reasonable amount of time.

Thanks for the help!

Greg

 

[Jezebel]

Why would you need to hit Format, Style a million times? A well-designed
document doesn't use many styles, and most of the style features should be
inherited anyway, to ensure graphic consistency. There's no utility that
will relieve you of the need to think about what you're doing.

 

[Guest]

Hello Greg,

I am responsible for managing the master "Branded" templates for a company
that deploy's the templates worldwide (about 150,00 desktops).

If you want to be able to manage a template for future migration you need to
first creat a set of design rules. It is actually quite easy depending on how
complex you want your templates.

My master "Brand" template is based on a combination of styles, autotext,
and macros, tied together with a custom toolbar. You can use any one or
combination of these powerful features to create a master template.

Styles are the foundation.

The following is limited to managing a master styles template.

1. Start with a clean copy of normal.dot
2. In your clean copy of normal.dot reset all heading and TOC styles to
their defaults
3. Define every style you anticipate needing in all templates.
4. Create logical names for these styles and freeze these style names in
STONE.
(Note you will want to group your styles according to your individual
hierarchy's doing this will allow you to take advantage of Word's outline
feature. You will usually want an individual set of Heading styles, Body
styles, numbering styles, and Character styles.)
5. When you have a master styles template, you can then create as many
different templates as you wish by simply changing the attributes (Font,
size, color...) to the styles in the master style template and save it under
a new template name.

Now, when you create a document based on one template, it can be migrated
accross all templates seamlessly.

The key to this working is the style names are the same in every template.

I set my templates to read only, organize all my styles according to their
logical groups in a custom toolbar. and finally, I only show the styles that
users need to access in the drop-down style menu.

Again depending on how complex and “migratable†you want your templates to
be. Doing this ranges from trivial to quite complex. But the reward is rally
worth it.

Jim

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Gotta agree with Jezebel...

But I've also got an icon to drop me immediately to Format | Style, saving
at least one click. Setting up a keyboard shortcut, even quicker.

Also, I think there's a way to format some text and then tell Word to create
a style from that formatting, which might be a little quicker. Since I
prefer to keep control, can't tell you what that way is, but it might be
something on the AutoFormat As You Type tab... Check Help.

In general, though, I think a web search is a better place to look for a
utility like this than this newsgroup, so try that too.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In Word 2002/2003, you can, if you have the Styles & Formatting pane open,
click on the New button to create a new style from a formatted paragraph.
Similarly, if you want to apply the formatting of a given paragraph to an
existing style, you can click the arrow beside the existing style name (not
on the style name itself, or you'll apply the current style) and choose
Update to Match Selection.

--
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.

 

[Greg Huntzinger]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my question.

In response, I have already done a fairly extensive web search for the
utility that I have in mind and came up empty, which is how I ended up
here. If there is a suggestion of another forum or newsgroup that
would be good to try, I'd love to here about it.

WRT the UI issue, I write driver and system software and I'm used to
having lots of specialized tools to give me detailed access to my
objects. IMO, the Format, Style thing in Word is an inefficent pain
for anything other than occasional use. It is so awful that users will
accept bad style sheets just so that they don't have to use it!

I was sort of hoping for a utiltiy that had a tree display like the
CSS tools in DreamWeaver.

Thanks again,

Greg