Mac Forum / Applications / Word / February 2006

Hi John:

Yeah, "Inheritance" in an object-oriented application is a very complex
subject, so it will take a bit of time to assimilate it all.  Hang in there:
the journey's worth it :-)

This is "not" a Word problem, so re-installing Word will only waste your
time.  It will not have any effect on what you are seeing.

You could fix the problems for FUTURE documents by making a new default
template to create them from.  However, it would be better to fix your
existing template, so that you do not lose your customisations.

If you do not choose a different template when you create a new document,
Word creates each document as a copy of your Normal template.  You can
re-name the Normal template.  If you do this with Word closed, it will
create a new blank default Normal template when it next starts up.  In that
template, Normal style will not be set to Automatically update.  But several
others will be.  I don't think that's worth doing.

For any existing document, the template does not come into play: once the
style definitions are copied into the new document when it is created, Word
makes no further reference to the template for STYLES.  So you need to fix
each individual document.

One way to do that is to fix the first document, then use Organiser to copy
its styles to all the other documents.  You can look up Organiser in the
Word Help: it's a very powerful tool, which they hide from new users because
you can do awesome damage with it if you are careless :-)

The error you saw "Compile Error: Expected End Sub." simply means you missed
a line when you copied the macro.  There's a new copy below: notice that the
last statement, on a line by itself, is "End Sub".  That must be there, to
tell the compiler where the program ends...

OK, below is a new version of the macro.  If you display this post in HTML,
you will see that it has coloured lines in it.  The green line is currently
inactive, because it has been ³commented out² by placing a single apostrophe
at the beginning.

In this format, the macro will ³find² each style that has ³Automatically
update² turned on.  It will beep, display the name of the style, and stop to
allow you to correct the problem.

However: if you remove the Πcharacter from the front of the green line, AND
delete all the red lines, the macro will then run through the entire style
table in the document without pausing, and switch ALL styles to
non-auto-update.  This change will happen almost instantly and the macro
will give no indication that anything has happened.  If that was your
problem, this will fix the whole document in one click :-)

You can then set the formatting the way you want it, and it will stick that
way.  Get into the habit of using a different style for each ³kind² of
paragraph in your document.  Hint: make up styles based on the kind of
paragraph you would use them on, not the formatting they contain.  So:
³Body Text², ³Heading 1², ³List Number² etc.  You will find that Word
contains a large selection of styles already built-in: those three are
amongst them.  The more styles you have, the finer-grained your control over
your document formatting.

Get out of the habit of applying formatting directly to text: that just
makes work for you.  Each time you want to change the formatting, you have
to track down each place it¹s used and change it.  By using styles, if you
want to change the formatting, you change it once in the style and the
entire document changes with a single click.

The problem you have is because that mechanism is operating when you don¹t
want it to, because your base style is set to ³Automatically Update².  This
means that whenever you change the formatting of any paragraph formatted
with the style in question, Word updates the style definition to incorporate
your change.  If the document is using only one style, when that happens the
whole document changes.

Here¹s the macro:

Sub findAutoUpdate()
' Finds AutUpate styles
' Macro written 21 Feb 2006 by John McGhie

Dim aStyle As Style

For Each aStyle In ActiveDocument.Styles
   If aStyle.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then
       If aStyle.AutomaticallyUpdate = True Then
   Œ       aStyle.AutomaticallyUpdate = False
           MsgBox aStyle.NameLocal
           Beep
           End
       End If
   End If
   Next ' astyle

End Sub

On 22/2/06 5:01 PM, in article
1140586199.290371.210560@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, "jdj1974@gmail.com"