I have a 200+ page document with many custom styles. I want to create individual files for each of the chapters and maintain the styles from one location, using a template.

So here's what I did: Create a new template called "MyTemplate" with all the styles, etc.... Break up each chapter into their own individual document and attach the new "MyTemplate" so that the styles can be controlled from one location.

To create the individual files I created a new document based on "MyTemplate" and copy/paste a chapter from the original document.



The problem is: When I go into MyTemplate and modify a font-size of a style this change is not reflected in the new file, even though "Automatically update document styles" is checked in "Templates and Add-ins. Any idea why??? Thanks

Using Word 2011 for MAC.

Check your copy/paste settings - you may have the 'preserve source formatting' paste option checked.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Paul, your answer is interesting. I would have thought that the automatic style update function would override copy and paste settings, or, perhaps, bypass them. I visualize the style-updating from template as a sort of background function not affected by the copy/paste settings. However, I don't doubt your knowledge.

That said, I should note that I have come to disregard the four choices in the advanced options to some extent, simply because in a number of cases, they have evidently not functioned as indicated, a problem I ascribe to the increasing complexity of Word's multiplicity of functions. In one case a few years ago, a colleague and I spent a half-hour wrestling with this before we discovered another "switch" in the options (I don't recall what it was), in a seemingly unrelated function, that affected how text was brought in.

Philip

Are you sure that the font-size in the original text is set in the style and not through direct formatting?

BTW, keeping automatically update styles from template checked is the source of problems when documents are sent to a different computer. What happens when I send my document to someone else? Will Word mess up my formatting?

I'm not sure why you are breaking your chapters into separate files. Word will handle much larger documents than 200 pages. The largest I've put together was 10,000 pages +. You do want to use heading styles and the navigation pane to navigate a larger document.

Thanks everyone for your feedback and suggestions. When I was using the document thru OneDrive on my iPad it seemed to lag a bit when I typed. Also, it was a pain scrolling pages. (There's no easy way to jump to a page as I see so far.) That's why I wanted to split up the files to make them more manageable.

I have not used Word on an iPad and suspect I never will. (I am too attached to a tactile keyboard, among other things.)

So, speaking from ignorance, is the navigation pane available? Can you use heading styles to organize your document? If so, you can easily navigate around in it.