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Subject:RE: Word without proliferation of styles From:"Will Husa Documentation Solutions" <will -dot- husa -at- 4techwriter -dot- com> To:"'McLauchlan, Kevin'" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 17 Mar 2011 09:43:15 -0500
I feel your pain. A couple of years ago, I got a document that was so
corrupted with changes made by several individuals using different styles
and special formatting that the only way to fix the corruption was to save
the document to Text and start over. It took a while, but the client ended
up with a clean document.
=============================
Will Husa
Technical Writer
Will Husa Documentation Solutions
708.927.3569
www.4techwriter.com
will -dot- husa -at- 4techwriter -dot- com
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+will -dot- husa=4techwriter -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+will -dot- husa=4techwriter -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of McLauchlan, Kevin
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 4:10 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Word without proliferation of styles
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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