Hey everyone.

Since a few years, my college has started requiring everyone to use a fixed cover page for all assignments that are to be handed in. My school has fantastic professors that I respect a great deal, but when it comes to computers, they're all pretty clumsy (even though they think they're great at it). The cover page is a total mess. Not on the outside, but the markup of it is a pain in the arse.



For one, it uses a bunch of empty headings so it messes up the navigation pane, but sure, I can live with that.

What bothers me most is that if I change the standard font and the styles for the headings, the cover page will change along with it. In other words, it kinda seems as if the cover page forces me to use certain fonts and so on. We're not allowed to deviate from the standard cover page, so I can't do that.

Now I reckon you might be thinking: "Can't you just set your favourite styles and then change the cover page fonts back to what they were?" And you'd be right, but it doesn't really seem ideal. If I did that, I'd have to put in a bunch of work for every new assignment I start to type and if I were to change a few styles while I'm working on a document, the cover page would go wonky again.

I've tried playing around with section breaks, but I couldn't really figure out a way to separate style sets.

[Edit] Oh, I'm not sure if it matters, but I'm using Word 2007 on a Windows 7 machine right now, instead of the versions listed in my profile.

Either create new styles for the cover page that retain the format, but use style names that are not used elsewhere; or create styles for the rest of your document that do not conflict with the style names already used on your cover page. I think I would go with the latter. Create the styles as based on no-style, so changes to them will not trickle through to affect others.

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com

If you save the cover page as an RTF document, then open it in WordPad, make a trivial edit, save, then re-open in Word, all the formatting should be intact but without the Style definitions (everything should be in 'Normal' Style with direct formatting). You can then use your Styles normally (except 'Normal') for the rest of the document.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks guys. Those are great suggestions. I've just quickly tried both to see if I understood them correctly and, indeed, both work very nicely. Helped me out a bunch!