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Subject:RE: MS Word - changing old docs to new styles From:"Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:00:24 -0500
Not clear from your post if the existing formatting is manual or
style-based.
In the former case, the easiest method would be a Find-and-Replace,
where the Find What field specifies the existing manual format (e.g.,
Arial 16 pt Bold Space Before 12 pt Keep With Next), and the Replace
With field specifies the desired style (e.g., Heading 1).
In the latter case, where styles have been applied but they're not
consistent with the template, consider CTRL+A, CTRL+Q. This applies your
template's definitions to all paragraphs.
-- Dan Goldstein
> -----Original Message-----
> From: neilson
> Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 9:49 AM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: MS Word - changing old docs to new styles
>
> I have a large set of docs that have become variously
> formatted over time. I would like them to adhere to one set
> of standard styles, and I know exactly how I would do it if I
> were using a markup language: I would write a few emacs
> macros that would identify the non-standard markup and make it
> right.
>
> Unfortunately, everything is in MS Word, and I'm not having
> too much luck finding any way to do the work other than
> slogging through the docs making replacements for everything
> by hand, hoping I'm doing it right, and then checking up to
> make sure Word hasn't decided to mess up something else while
> I was in there. Yes, I attach my new template instead of
> Normal.dot, but there's still all the by-hand work to do.
>
> I'd really like to have an automated way to handle this
> problem, as additional "existing" docs continue to appear as
> SMEs take old pre-standards documentation and use it as a
> template for new material.
>
> Am I missing some tool or technique that'll make it easy?
>
> Should I export all to XML and run an emacs macro on the XML
> code? Word's XML is, to say the least, immense.
>
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