Friends, what is the best way to deal with global building blocks that contain styles which are also used in document-template list templates?
Sometimes these work perfectly; other times not, and I can’t work out why.
I make Word templates to share with my colleagues, so they have to work well. I create document templates with VBA, and list templates with VBA. I use Dave Rado’s tip for avoiding nameless List Templates (http://www.office-archive.com/59-word/8e019fd80007b311.htm) and Bruce Brown’s tip, quoted by Shauna Kelly, for finding list templates by the style linked to the first list level (http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Word/microsoft.public.word.numbering/2004-05/0020.html). So I can create a document template with just 4 or 5 nameless list templates, and the 8 LTs that I want.
I have a global building-block template with lots of useful bits of standard text, for instance, 7 tables with 2, 3,…8 columns, in the company style. The heading row is in style tbHeading (I use custom table styles, as recommended by Cindy Meisters http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Word/microsoft.public.word.tables/2004-12/0002.html), and the rows in style tbCell. All good–it’s easy to insert tables, with a leading paragraph and a table caption all included.
And I have a list template (in the document templates–not in the global template), an outline list with level 1 tbHeading, and level 2 tbRowNum, which is a number. The idea is that in any table with a heading row, you can apply tbRowNum to the first columns, and rows are magically numbered, always starting from 1. It’s handy for instance when you want to quickly count the rows in a target table, to copy in content from that many rows in a source table.
Sometimes, this works with no problems. Other times, for instance when I’ve updated a document template, the row numbering doesn’t restart–until I use ‘reset paragraph to style’ on the heading row. That fixes the numbering, but in these cases adding the table from a building block also adds a nameless list template to the document. Some other building blocks also add an LT to the document template.
The building-block template has the same styles as the document templates; this is unavoidable, I think. I could create all the list templates in the building-block template, but from memory, this didn’t work last time I tried it. And I know that things sometimes work without that.
Can any of you clever people suggest how to deal with this issue?
Much thanks for reading as far as this…
Moray
