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Subject:Re: Word without proliferation of styles From:"Weissman, Jessica" <WeissmanJ -at- abacustech -dot- com> To:"McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> Date:Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:37:03 -0400
First I would make sure I was seeing only styles listed, not all formatting. Turn off Keep Track of Formatting. That gives you a clearer picture of what's there.
And then I would assess. You may be ok reapplying styles. Or you may have a corrupt infested mess, in which case a trip to plain ASCII text is indicated. Good luck.
Jessica
On Mar 16, 2011, at 5:10 PM, "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> wrote:
> All,
>
> Document was created in Word 2003, several years ago,
> and great care was taken to create and use only a
> limited set of styles (none based on Normal), with
> almost no spot formatting.
>
> Document was then used by other parties as basis
> for documenting an offshoot product. The other
> persons entirely ignored styles, did everything
> via spot formatting, and even imported sections
> from other docs - which brought in hundreds more
> styles.
>
> Offshoot product became mainstream and landed back
> on my table.
>
> I stopped counting at around 1000 "styles".
>
> I'm thinking that the best approach is to just
> suck it all into Notepad, then start pasting,
> piecemeal, into a clean LibreOffice document,
> and applying the clean style scheme from there.
>
> But, if there's a reasonable way to attack the
> clean-up in Word, I might try that.
>
> This is not something I expect to do every year,
> or even three, so it's not really worthwhile to
> invest a lot of money or time in tools or learning
> the scripting or otherwise ramping up to tackle
> just two docs, totalling less than 300 pages between 'em.
>
> What would you do?
>
>
>
> Kevin McLauchlan
> Senior Technical Writer
> SafeNet, Inc.
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