"Kill it, burn it..."

[julesjones]

...salt the ground upon..."
"Oh."
"That is useful. I do not remember it being in Word 2003. I will check upon the morrow using the one at work."

No, it wasn't in 2003, but it is in 2007. I may have to forgive the ribbon after all. One of the ways in which I hate Word so very very much is the way it handles, or fails to handle, stylesheets. In Word Pro a different stylesheet is two clicks away, which amongst other things makes it easy to re-format a manuscript to whatever font/point size/margins/etc a publisher wants before printing/emailing. Word doesn't do it the same way, and whatever it does do, it doesn't make sense to me. It *still* doesn't make sense to me, but two clicks away in the ribbon there is a facility to select all instances of the style used in the selected text - and change them to a different existing style. Which appears to be a usable work-around for the problem of re-setting a manuscript to whatever formatting the publisher wants without losing the italics and such-like.

I still have to work out how to import the desired styles where there is a required stylesheet so that I don't have to copy and paste the entire document into a new file with the relevant template, but that's a matter of poking at it. Alternatively, I would like to do what I often do in Word Pro with scratch note files and just import a file into an existing file, but if there is a way to do this I have not seen any indication that it exists.

I still hate Word, but I hate it slightly less than I did.

Comments

[kalypso]

I do find styles awkward in 2003, though I've worked out my own way of accessing the one I need for work. So that would be nice, but I don't think it's sufficient compensation for making the things that used to be easy so difficult.

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

It should not be so freaking difficult and complicated and UN-intuitive. Glad you are able to figure out a workaround, though.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

What I hate about the last couple of iterations of Word...wait, let me make a list...no, we'll be here all day.

Okay: One of the things that used to work was that attaching a new stylesheet (and getting rid of the old one, sometimes) used to change not only the paragraph and font formatting, but also the page formatting: you could write with half-inch margins, if you were terminally cheap, and when you attached the new stylesheet they became inch margins as well as the paragraph and font styles with the same names being updated.

Not so now. If document A has a margin (or a header), you must make the change to document B by pasting or by resetting the margin.

Eww.

(If there is a way, let me know. But I've asked Word experts.)

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I've always used the find-and-replace dialogue for changing styles. Importing styles on a Mac works by using styles->organiser and then copying them across from the other document/normal.dot.