Templates (2000)

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I’ve got heavy duty reformatting of many messy word docs. Want to create styles and apply the .dot to these documents. But somehow, once I’ve made the .dot, gone into my messy document, and “attached” the .dot, the styles don’t come along, or I’m doing it all wrong. Please somebody give me a breakdown with this process? And I’d like consistent margins along with it. Help! Working over the weekend here in midtown! Ick!

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Hi Naomi:

Attaching a new template by itself to a document will NOT change document styles. You must copy the styles from your new template to your old documents. There are several ways to do this & I’ll comment on each. Note, however, that if you have manual formatting in each document, updating the style generally doesn’t remove it. I say generally because Word follows a complex set of rules when your paragraph has character formatting (e.g. bold, italic, underline) & your style has the same or opposite formatting. Here are the ways:

1. Attach a new template & then open each document & go to Tools/Templates & add-ins/ & tick “automatically update document styles”. All styles in the document that have the same name as the new style are immediately updated.

2. Attach a new template & then open each document & go to Tools/Templates & add-ins & press the Organizer button. There will be 2 panes: the left is your document & the right is normal.dot. Close normal.dot & open your new template. Click the styles tab & you will now be able to copy from the right pane to the left. This has the advantage of allowing you to copy exactly the styles you wish.

3. The 3rd way is through the Style Gallery. This will copy all the styles from the attached template to your document in one fell swoop.

Before applying your new styles, you can get rid of manual formatting by selecting the text & pressing Ctrl+Q (to get rid of manual paragraph formatting) & Ctrl+Spacebar to get rid of manual character formatting.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks Phil. All the detail helps.

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Naomi,

The steps in Phil’s post will help you get the new .dot attached and get the styles from that .dot into your existing document, but in this situation I think you’re better off creating a brand new empty document based on the new .dot, and then either copying everything but the last paragraph mark in the original document and pasting it into the new document, or using File>Insert (which accomplishes the same thing).

This method is just a bit easier in that you get:
– The new template attached
– All the new styles included
– The correct page setup properties per the new template

… all in one go.

If you’re completely abandoning all of the formatting in your original documents anyway, then you’re best off copying the content, creating a new document based on the new .dot, and then PasteSpecial > Unformatted Text into the new document – that way you’re sure of leaving any possible old mischief behind in the old document.

HTH and good luck with your project,
Gary

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Gary – you know what’s odd about this whole template thing? You’d assume that paper size and margins are all included. After all it’s a template, right? But attaching a template did not change those dimensions (as you’d indicated.) However, exploring in page set-up, when I clicked on “default”, Word warned me that changing those dimensions would affect all the documents also defined by that same template. So, I clicked on “default” – nothing! What default are they talking about? 8-1/2×11 or what I’d set up in the template? What gives??

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Hi Naomi:

I’m not Gary , but I might be able to answer some of your questions.
1. When a document is created, it is copied from the attached template. However, it doesn’t contain everything a template has. It contains (list is not exhaustive):

styles
section formatting (margins & other page setup formats)
boilerplate text, including fields

It does not acquire from the attached template:
macros
toolbars
Autotext
keyboard shortcuts

Those remain with the attached template. If you attach a different template to the document, the ONLY things that change are those 4 items. You can think of creating a document as a birth (how’s that for a far out analogy). Once born, the document’s formatting and style are independent from the template. Changing attached templates only gives you access to different macros, toolbars, Autotext (if the template has any), & keyboard shortcuts!

2. Other than the above, the ONLY advantage that I can think of to attaching a different template to a document is that it gives some additional ways to copy styles from the template to the document (& vice versa). However, unless you copy the styles, styles between the document & it’s attached template are independent from each other. If you have Tools/Templates & add-ins/Automatically update document styles ticked (which you should never have unless you are doing it temporarily for a purpose), if you then attach a new template, the document styles will be updated to match styles in the new template. i.e. you just copied all the template styles to your document.

3. When you click the default button in the Page Setup dialog box, the warning says that the “change will affect all NEW documents based on that template”. It does NOTHING to the existing document.

Hope this clears things up.

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Hi Naomi,

I think Phil has answered your question. There is a big difference between what a document gets from a template when you create a new document based on the template and what it gets from the template when you attach the template to an existing document. It is a difference that isn’t always pointed out in Microsoft’s documentation.

I just wanted to give you an additional reference for understanding templates. See (addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm) for information on the different kinds of templates, where they are stored, and how to get them to show up under the File => New dialog. You may also want to take a look at Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word (addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm).

Hope this helps,

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