TOC and formatting problems in "highly designed" doc for distribut

[Guest]

Hi, Ive been assigned the task of preparing a Word document which currently
has Text Boxes as opposed to Word Columns and various elements which bleed
off the page.

The doc is for distribution within a company network and should enable the
final users to type/paste into the doc and have the look and feel and text
styles/formatting update automatically.

Ive been told a TOC can do this, but Im really not sure if this is possible
the way the document currently stands.

Can anyone recommend any tutorials or help?

 

[Jezebel]

What are you hoping the TOC will do?

To put it bluntly, you're on a hiding to nothing here. There is just no way
you can distribute a document with convoluted formatting like this, for
editing by general users across an organisation, and expect the document to
survive intact. 'text boxes instead of columns', 'elements which bleed' ...
most users won't have the faintest idea what's going on. They'll just delete
the nonsense and type their text into the body where it belongs.

You can set a document to use only the defined styles; but by the sound of
it, you yourself don't understand styles very well; and presumably your
users are even less informed. And there's nothing you can do to preserve
elements.

Go back to whoever assigned you this task and tell them to think again. This
ain't gonna work.

 

[macropod]

Hi AMX,

TOCs are only for building Tables of Contents, and your document has to be
properly structured for this to work (eg through the use of Word's Heading
Styles).

For the body of your document, you can create various relationships between
Styles (eg hitting <Enter> at the end of a Heading1 Style paragraph will
start a new paragraph in the Heading2 Style) but, even so, you can't:
a) count on these relationships always holding true
b) force users to adhere to this scheme
c) prevent users from taking a paragraph in one Style and inappropriately
reformatting it to look like another.

Cheers