What is the best practices when sharing a Word doc

[matfis]

Hi all,
I'm sharing/creating a Word doc with someone outside my company (i have
win2K+officeXP).
Often the doc comes back with messy format (surely based on different
normal.dot and styles).
What would be the best practises to avoid that ?
tia
Matfis

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Is there are any best practices to avoid this, we'd all love to hear them.
Whenever you send a properly constructed Word document to someone less
knowledgeable about Word, you can pretty much depend upon it that what you
will get back will be a dog's breakfast. And that will be true regardless of
how easy you make it for the recipient to use the styles you intended for
specific purposes. You might as well just resign yourself to this and factor
in time for cleanup.

If you had Word 2003 you could restrict the styles that could be used, but
even this might not be helpful if the recipient had an earlier version of
Word.