[Mike007]

I was asked a few questions today about working with Microsoft Word 2003 and styles in Word, I will say, more like issues. When I tried to help, I quickly learned that Microsoft Word styles reminded me too much of the problems I have with IE when i'm designing a website. But, I can't look at the HTML or at the mark-up langauage to help me get a better clue.

The problem: multiple word documents -- each with a different style -- or parts of them, , are used to create a large document. Now, the larger document needs to be uniform. But, sometimes when changes are made to one part of that document, another part magicly changes it style. E.g. defining some text as a "Header1" style, but then the "Normal" text near it, or somewhere else changes, it loses its' Italic property (not defined in the style itself, but only to some text). I've also seen some problem with the tables, margins everywhere, the style it self, the table cells, what not, so much wasted time fixing it. Problems with the table of content (the automatic table of content, generated by word), loses all of its' styles when updated.

As this is not webdesgin, and I cannot as clearly see the problems with the document, do you have any tips for me on how to avoid all that, and to speed up the work? It is a real waste of work time, fixing it all by hand, not to mention might drive someone insane if it changes everytime you try to fix it.

The only way I know that is designed to handle this exact problem, is CSS, but, well Microsoft and W3C are.... well light years apart.

Thanks in advance, Mike.

This post has been edited by Mike007: 29 December 2007 - 12:07 AM

[William_Wilson]

it may not help much, but if you make a copy of the document and change the extension to .zip, you can view all the XML files being used to get an idea of how the document is ordered and arranged.

I have the same problem with word 2003/2007 it assumes too much often and the undo, sometimes results in what you want, even though it should undo the operation.

[lockdown]

The problem with word is word itself. When making changes to certain parts of the document sometimes word decides that is how you want the whole document.

For what to do with this issue its a little hard because getting word to do what you want is no easy task. I have taken a Microsoft Certification course for office applications and the instructor said word can be powerful but getting it to do what you want is sometimes almost impossible.

[William_Wilson]

lockdown, on 2 Jan, 2008 - 10:38 AM, said:

... word can be powerful but getting it to do what you want is sometimes almost impossible.

Could not have said it better myself. You are correct lockdown, the folks at MS should add a default option to apply options to the entire document or to the current area.

Although for conformity I use Word more these days (school supports it), I found Word Perfect to be a better solution often. The view code option is available since about version 8 or 9, and it is very easy to understand to remove or add the necessary changes. Why MS made these two products so different is beyond me.

[lockdown]

Quote

Although for conformity I use Word more these days (school supports it), I found Word Perfect to be a better solution often. The view code option is available since about version 8 or 9, and it is very easy to understand to remove or add the necessary changes. Why MS made these two products so different is beyond me.

Its because they are MS. They do what they want (or think the user wants) and if people dont like it they dont care.

I have really just found that for use technology people MS dose not offer a ton of products focused on our knowledge. a great example is the re-design of the office interface for Office 2007. They have made it really simple and its focused towards the end user. It is hard for people that know how to uses word very well to learn office 2007 because it is so much more simple.

In a sense I can see why Microsoft targets their products toward end users because they are mostly the people that purchase them. They feel people with a strong technology back round will just get uset to them or find a way to solve the problem but that gets old real quick.

I was at a Tech Net developer event for Vista and office 2007 last year in DC. The speaker was a fairly well know programmer (forget his name because at the time I was not a programmer but more network administrator). He said I like Microsoft since I work for them but would hate them otherwise. Thats pretty strong words coming from a developer but his reasoning was clear. Microsoft just dose not take their time when creating something. They give unrealistic deadlines and have to push products out to soon. Thats mainly how Vista is missing parts of Arow their new and upgrade interface that will be released in SP1 of Vista later this year.

I like Microsoft since I uses them for work (exchange, Server, all that stuff) but at the same time I really would rather not if I had a choice.

This post has been edited by lockdown: 02 January 2008 - 08:59 AM

[Mike007]

Thanks for your replies guys, and yeah i tried googling this problem for a while, but no solution so far. The zip thing is pretty neat, but it's not really helpful. I tried reading the XML code but it doesn't make too much sense, for the human reader anyway. Other than that i tried doing something with the different types of paste they have, but it wasn't too great.

So there is no way to copy something from document A to document B and have the text copied use document B formating and styles without crazy issues?

[lockdown]

Mike007, on 2 Jan, 2008 - 07:37 PM, said:

Thanks for your replies guys, and yeah i tried googling this problem for a while, but no solution so far. The zip thing is pretty neat, but it's not really helpful. I tried reading the XML code but it doesn't make too much sense, for the human reader anyway. Other than that i tried doing something with the different types of paste they have, but it wasn't too great.

So there is no way to copy something from document A to document B and have the text copied use document B formating and styles without crazy issues?

When you do a copy and paste you are basically taking a exact replica of what you want to copy. I believe (I am not a expert at how the back end of Office) but when you copy and paste it copies the code for were the text is located. The code includes all the formating for it along with the text you would want. I do not believe their is away around this without doing some modifications.

Having said that is might be worth searching around and seeing if their program that modifies the copy and past function. If not it would be a cool development idea for a application.

[Mike007]

Yeah it is a good idea to search for it.. but no luck so far, i don't think i would be able to find one too. I just can't believe that such a trivial operation was not included in Word.

[lockdown]

Mike007, on 5 Jan, 2008 - 03:11 PM, said:

Yeah it is a good idea to search for it.. but no luck so far, i don't think i would be able to find one too. I just can't believe that such a trivial operation was not included in Word.

Microsoft tries to include all the features people want and could possibly want to do but some get overlooked, not included due to conflicts, or just dont make it in for some reason. With this problem I would guess it would be related to a conflict between how the copy and paste function works. To my knowledge this problem still exist in the new Office 07 also.

It more then likely relates to have 1 more process needing to convert from one formate to the other. It is more then likely pretty complicated and something they might have had issues with designing properly.

Check out open office www.openoffice.org. It is the open source version of MS office that sun system built based on some code MS released a little while back. It is not a complete copy of MS office but is pretty close and can even work with Microsoft file formates. Give it a try and see if it can do what you would like but besides that its just something that we might never see come out of MS.

This post has been edited by lockdown: 05 January 2008 - 03:38 PM

[Mike007]

lockdown, on 5 Jan, 2008 - 03:37 PM, said:

Mike007, on 5 Jan, 2008 - 03:11 PM, said:

Yeah it is a good idea to search for it.. but no luck so far, i don't think i would be able to find one too. I just can't believe that such a trivial operation was not included in Word.

Microsoft tries to include all the features people want and could possibly want to do but some get overlooked, not included due to conflicts, or just dont make it in for some reason. With this problem I would guess it would be related to a conflict between how the copy and paste function works. To my knowledge this problem still exist in the new Office 07 also.

It more then likely relates to have 1 more process needing to convert from one formate to the other. It is more then likely pretty complicated and something they might have had issues with designing properly.

Check out open office www.openoffice.org. It is the open source version of MS office that sun system built based on some code MS released a little while back. It is not a complete copy of MS office but is pretty close and can even work with Microsoft file formates. Give it a try and see if it can do what you would like but besides that its just something that we might never see come out of MS.

Yeah one of my instructors always encourages us to try open office too. I've seen it myself, but it's really nothing but a cheap copy of office. Specially with the new office that is so simply organized and so logically. Really the new office layout works great, i found myself rediscovering many of the features i came to forget.

[lockdown]

I found open office to be ok but the only real complete solution for people that dont want to uses MS office.

Office 2007 so far has been great and it make things very simple but I miss having to find all my old features . I might go back to 03 but have not decided yet.