Master and Sub documents losing formatting

[BP]

Hi there. I have a client who is experiencing the following:

"The issues we are experiencing impact, in the current state, two master
documents and multiple sub-documents which make up a Customer Service
manual and an Order Processing manual. Basically, when I save the
document, the formatting is correct. When I re-open the document, font
sizes have changed, and some text is incorrectly bolded or italicized.

Our immediate thought was that someone had opened the document on a
computer that didn't have the Word SR-2 patch. We ruled this out, and the
problem continued to occur. Initially, each manual was created in one
file; we used a template that was created by a party who is no longer at
our company. Logically, we thought the template contained 'something' that
was over-riding our formatting. We dumped all auto-formatting features
from the existing documents, however, this did not resolve the problem.
Not certain if we had overlooked something in the template, we dumped the
template and copied the text into a new document. This did not resolve the
problem. Another thought was that the problems may have been related to
the size of our documents since they were unusually large. It was
recommended that we break our files into multiple files and create master
documents. We did this, however, the problem persisted. As a last ditch
effort we contacted Microsoft. During these conversations, we checked many
formatting options in Word. Once we didn't uncover anything there, we
changed the default formats on my PC with no luck. The last hope was to
save-as to new files, copy the documents, paste into new documents and
manually re-format the documents. I followed this procedure on all
sub-documents and created new master documents, however, we are still
encountering the same problem."

Can anyone shed any light for what to look at? Thanks in advance!!

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi BP:

In microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs on Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:03:47
-0600, "BP" <bpo...@pobox.com> wrote:

> "The issues we are experiencing impact, in the current state, two master
> documents and multiple sub-documents which make up a Customer Service
> manual and an Order Processing manual. Basically, when I save the
> document, the formatting is correct. When I re-open the document, font
> sizes have changed, and some text is incorrectly bolded or italicized.

This is pretty standard for a document that contains a mix of direct
formatting and style formatting and has been attached to the Normal.dot
template. Your immediate problem is probably caused by the "Automatically
update styles on open" box being checked in the Attach Template dialog.
However, the true fix will probably require you to carefully re-create the
document.

First, try Tools/Templates and add-ins and uncheck "Automatically update
document styles". Save, close, and re-open the document. If that fixes
your problem, good luck :-) If not...

There's no magic bullets, and there's no substitute for a lengthy, step-by
step reconstruction.

Advise the client to follow these steps:

1) Close all the documents and reboot (We need a nice clean copy of Word
running). It speeds things up if you close all other aplications while you
are heaving large documents around.

2) Open the best of the sub-documents. Do NOT open the master document,
just the subdocument.

3) Save the subdocument as a template (make sure you remember where).
Close it, re-open it, remove all the text, save it, and close it again. This
creates a template that has all the styles required set correctly.

4) Create a new, blank document from the new template you just created. We
will call this file "New Document" hereafter. Make sure you create New
Document FROM the template, using File/New. No other way will do. Give New
Document a name (must be a new name, do not save over an existing document)
and save it. You must not write over the existing documents: you may have
to repeat one or more of these procedures more than once; and you will need
your originals when you've finished.

Now follow the following procedure for each subdocument:

1) Open each document or sub-document, one at a time.

2) Make sure the paragraph marks are displayed. Use Tools/Options/View to
display them if needed: it is essential that you can see the paragraph
marks.

3) Remove all the section breaks from the document. Search for ^b and
replace with nothing. Note the "b" must be lowercase and the caret "^" is
required. Most document corruptions are contained in section breaks: you
must remove them.

4) Remove all your direct formatting: Select all of the text by Ctrl + A,
then remove all paragraph formatting with Ctrl + Q and all character
formatting with Ctrl + spacebar. Your document may start to look quite
peculiar at this stage: do not worry about it, and don't try to fix it now.

5) Select all the text from the top of the document down to BUT NOT
INCLUDING the final paragraph mark and copy it to the clipboard. The bottom
paragraph mark in a document hides the default section break, which is
probably what contains the problem. If you copy the last paragraph mark,
you will copy the problem.

6) Close WITHOUT SAVING. You do not want to save the changes you have just
made back to your original. Close the document, and when prompted to save,
say NO.

7) Open New Document and past the text you have copied into its correct
position. Save it, and do not attempt any fixing at this stage.

8) Repeat these steps until you have copied all the text from all the
components into New Document.

Notes:

Do not be tempted to re-create a master document. Whoever gave you that
advice was wrong: the master document is what is preventing you from solving
this problem, and it will steadily make it worse. If you re-create the
master document, you will immemdiately re-create the problem. Master
documents have been fatally buggy since Word 6, and remain so through Word
2000. If you use them you lose them. They must never be used for valuable
text.

Do not attempt any fixing of any of the text until you have all the text
assembled in New Document. If your PC is correctly configured, Word 97/2000
will easily handle a document up to about 1,000 pages, so do not worry: it
will slow down a bit but it won't break.

Now you begin the fixing process. Do it in this order or you will end up
chasing your tail:

1) replace the section breaks. You still have your originals so you can
search for them to see where they should go. But remember, the section
breaks probably contain the problem: if copy any section breaks by mistake,
you probably get to start over from the creation of New Document :-)

When replacing the section breaks, you will probably leave out most of the
breaks you find in the original master document. In a master document, each
subdocument is surrounded by two extra "encapsulating" section breaks that
are needed only in the master document: they should not be used in New
Document. The fewer section breaks you end up with, the more reliable your
result will be.

2) Now unify the styles. First go through and re-name/re-apply mis-named
styles. Often where a document has been attacked by unskilled authors, you
will find that styles have been applied at random, and that there are
several versions of each style. For example: You may find a "text" style,
a "Text" style, a "body-text" style, a "Body-Text" style and a "body text"
style. Careful inspection of the document will show that they are all
actually the same thing, created by different authors who didn't know what
they were doing, in different source documents. Before you can sort out
your styles, you need to pick ONE name (doesn't matter which one, but your
life will be easier of you pick the Word built-in style name) and use
Find/Replace to apply that to the paragraphs that have the other named
styles. You must then delete the duplicate styles from BOTH the document
and its template (otherwise in a months time, you will have random styles
again...)

3) Now you need to correct the formatting of each style. You use
Format/Style to alter the properties of each style so that the document is
correctly formatted. Some hints:
a) Make sure you check the "Add to template" box for each style, or your
changes will not be saved.
b) Make sure NONE of your styles are "Based On" Normal style. Correct
any that are. Base your headings on the heading level above and your text
styles on Body Text. I normally leave Normal Style orphaned so that
wherever it is used in the document I can tell that I am looking at text
that has not been formatted yet.
c) Make sure that all the automatic formatting options remain turned off.
Make sure that you also disable Fast Saves and check Always Make Backup.
Make sure you disable Automatically Update on all your styles. If your
document contains numbering, you must also disable Automatically Update
Styles on Open when you attach the template.

3) Now go through the document and apply the correct styles to all the
paragraphs. Part of the reason your document looked like a ransom note is
that you had multiple bits of direct formatting and various styles used
inappropriately. Use each style for only one purpose. If you do not have a
style for a purpose, create one. Do not allow any styles to be used for
more than one purpose. Do not permit any formatting that is not applied by
styles (yeah, OK, bold and italic are OK as direct formatting for a few
characters. But never for a whole paragraph and not for anything else!).

With a bit of luck, your document will now be dependable and maintainable
and it will stay that way.

Hope this helps.

Please post follow-up questions to the newsgroup so that all may follow the thread.

John McGhie <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au>
Consultant Technical Writer
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Sydney, Australia (GMT +10 hrs) +61 (04) 1209 1410

[BP]

Wow! Thank you for your time, John. I really appreciate your time and
expertise.

BP

John McGhie [MVP - Word] wrote in message ...