Locking Word Styles

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Lenn - 05 Feb 2004 15:33 GMT

Hi,

I'm not sure if this the correct forum for this question.
If not, please let me know.

Is there a way to lock Word styles so that people who use
them cannot change them. I have created several styles
for use in my department's documents and people keep
changing them (either intentionally or unintentionally).
The result is confusion and inconsistency.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

-- Lenn

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Margaret Aldis - 05 Feb 2004 17:27 GMT

In Word 2003 you can protect the styles; before that, no. A couple of ideas:

Make sure that the styles don't have 'automatically update' set - if they
do, any direct formatting the user applies will change the style.

Give users a menu or toolbar to apply styles with - then if they reapply a
style to a paragraph that has some direct formatting they won't get asked if
they want to redefine the style.

You might also want to look at updating styles from template. You can do
this with a one line macro (ActiveDocument.UpdateStyles) that could be run
to 'clean up' documents or manually from Tools > Templates and Add-ins (but
if you do it this way you should uncheck the option afterwards).

Hope this helps

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Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
>
> -- Lenn

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- 05 Feb 2004 18:01 GMT

Thanks!

I thought the answer was no for Word prior to 2003, but
wanted to make sure. I did not think of the other
possibilities you mentioned, and am glad you suggested
them.

-- Lenn

>-----Original Message-----
>In Word 2003 you can protect the styles; before that, no. A couple of ideas:
[quoted text clipped - 31 lines]
>
>.

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