Quote:
Originally Posted by jthomas666
Alignment is a paragraph-level attribute. I suppose you could create a paragraph style in which everything is blank but the alignment...?
Also, a brief training session can make a world of difference. I started a new job 6 months ago, and one of the first things I did was to create a template for some QA testing reports. I did a 1-hour session that first went over how styles worked, then how the new templates worked.
In that session, I stressed the need to use ONLY the styles in the template, and not use the formatting tools on the toolbar (I labeled that section of the menu "The Bad Place").
In your case, it might be useful to spend some time to introduce them to the table styles and how they work, and how to use the Bad Place controls to tweak as needed.
The final thing to stress is that if they really screw up the table formatting (and they will), they can just use the Clear All command in the Styles pane to reset the table back to the original table style.
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Yay, a kindred spirit!
I've worked as an editor at my company for almost 13 years and have written up instructions and documentation, taught learning sessions, helped a lot of people one-on-one, and simply fixed things myself when in a time crunch. There are some people that really are interested in learning how to do things on their own, and other people that just want "quick and dirty." (The latter people make my little perfectionist heart die a little inside with every document...)
This is a case where they want a template, but they also want it to be as "quick and dirty" as possible so they can quickly compare numbers and metrics throughout each report.
To my knowledge, you can't create a paragraph style with blank settings for the font, size, etc. (I just tested it, and it won't let me leave those fields blank.) If you know of a way to do this, though, I'd love to know!