Importing Word doc into my doc without taking on style

[David]

Hi

I often have a need to import a Word document, created by someone
else, into one which I have prepared.

Frequently the doc to be imported has been created by someone with
limited knowledge of Word, filled with spurious styles etc, lots of
the dreadful 'autoformat' implemented... and althought they may have
bodged the end result to look OK, everything goes completely haywire
when the new doc takes on the styles which I have set up in my master
document. It then takes ages to completely reformat the whole
document properly.

Any way of resolving this one easily?

Thanks
David

 

[David]

Would selecting the whole document to be imported, copying with CNTL-C and
then, in your own document, using "Paste Special" with the choice, "import
as unformatted text" not work?

Thanks James.
Sounds plausible, but no, unfortunately not - just tried this and also
"import as formatted text" for good measure. Either way the
formatting is still screwed.

Any other ideas?!

Thanks

 

[Eric Fletcher]

I get this all the time with work I do. My recommendation is to open the
document and do a first pass cleanup before attempting to bring it into your
document or saving it to use it from your master document. Some of the
things I would typically do include:

a) Attach your own template and allow Word to update the styles. This will
use your definitions for styles with the same name but doesn't get rid of
their styles.

b) If you use Word 10, bring up the Task Bar and display Formatting in use.
This poorly-documented feature of Word allows you to select all instances of
a given format: hover over the style name and click the pull-down that will
appear on the right to choose "select all X instances" (avoid clicking in
the name box or you'll just be setting the style to the selection). Note
that this lets you know how many times a particular format occurs; I use it
to eliminate orphans. Once selected, you can either apply a style or overide
a manually-applied format. This technique is much faster than the old search
and replace method for eliminating unwanted styles and IMHO, warrants the
upgrade cost.

c) Use search and replace extensively to get rid of other common problems. I
have a VBA routine (several actually) to speed this up. You can remove
multiple spaces and returns; fix inconsistent use of dashes; change
manually-set bullets to a style... it will depend on what the document is
like.

d) You'll lose any internal formatting (like italics) but you can also use
Ctrl-Spacebar to set a selection to the underlying font for the style or
Ctrl-Shift-N to set it to the Normal style.

e) Use heading levels and the Outline view to see the structure. You can
double-click a heading to see all of the text at that level so it is handy
to be able to adjust by seeing the context.

After doing the cleanup, copy the content into your document.

Tip: Get familiar with the "wildcard" feature of Word's find and replace.
You can fix some really hairy problems with it if you look for the
underlying pattern. For example, I routinely change any instance of numeric
ranges set with hyphens to be correctly set with en dashes: type
"([0-9])(-)([0-9])" in the Find what box (without the quotes), "\1^0150\3"
in the replace with box and check the "use wildcards" option (you may need
to show "More..." in the dialog to see tha latter). This finds any digit
hyphen digit and changes it to digit en dash digit. The feature is a bit
obscure and not well documented but extremely useful for cleaning up common
errors.

Good luck!
Eric

 

[ThomasL]

(e-mail address removed) (David) wrote in

Any other ideas?!

Thanks

This may or may not work for you, but, I have produced several anthologies
of people's works from all different platforms. What I do is...
- open the document you need to bring in, inside Word
- Select All
- Cut
- Open Notepad -- not wordpad
- Paste the document into Notepad
- Save as <something>.txt
- Close the original incarnation of Word
- Open your document
- Open a copy of the .txt document
- Select All
- Apply YOUR formatting, and proceed.

Notepad is about as smart as a mousepad. It knows nothing of formatting
characters, font changes, and so on. It disgards everything. Hence, what
you import is pure text.

It might sound like a lot of work, but it's actually fairly quick to do
once you're in the flow.

Good Luck.

thomas