Dear Word community



In our company, we updated the corporate design (new Word templates with Styles).

Now a lot of the employees have reports (with 100+ pages) in the old design.

If they now want to update their old reports, is their only solution to copy and paste the text in the old documents and paste it (without formatting) into the new template and set the appropriate Style sheets, or is there a faster way? Combining the contents when copy-pasting it does not seem to work...

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks a lot!

You can change the template which is being used by an existing document.
If you open the existing report, go to File tab > Options. Select Add-ins from the list.
From the Manage drop down menu choose Templates and click Go.
You will see the Templates and Add-ins dialog box and it will show the current template being used by the document. Click the Attach button and locate the NEW template and attach it, also tick the box for Automatically Update document styles.
Click OK.

Give that a try and let me know how it goes.

Old reports should not be updated to the new design - they are, after all, old reports. Changing them now could have adverse implications if your company was required to produce electronic copies of them for legal proceedings.

If you need to use some of the old content for new reports, use the new template and copy the relevant content from the old reports. If there have been substantial formatting changes, you may find it easiest to paste the old content in as unformatted text (don't do this with hyperlinks, bookmarks & cross-references, footnote/endnote references, tables & images), then apply the new Style definitions to what has been copied & pasted.

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