Hi John,

Complex documents, especially, should be managed via the use of a comprehensive suite of paragraph and character Styles. Where multiple documents are concerned, a common template containing all these Styles is preferred. By having such a template and setting each document's properties to 'automatically update document styles', ensuring a consistent format is relatively straight-forward - it also allows all the documents' formatting to be updated by simply modifying the Style definitions in their common template.

All you need to do then is to educate the document editors to use the Styles appropriately and to not override them with hard-formatting.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]