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#1
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Why does my document look different after someone in a different location has edited it
We have a common issue which occurs when we send documents to people in other physical locations (e.g. other offices around the world) for editing & review (with comments).
The issue is that when the document is sent back to us, following editing elsewhere, it is pretty messed up. Styles have changed, the document generally looks different. I understand this could be because they have different templates/printer settings etc. on their local machine. So, when they open the document it messes things up. The transfer is internally to people within the same organisation. The documents are created using templates stored in a central company toolbox and opened via Word. Users are on either Office 2013 or 2016. Essentially, we want to allow other people to edit the documents, but have confidence that the document will come back looking as it did, just with different content/added comments. Some common examples include: o The headings have changed to be all capital letters o The report title has now been captured as a heading in the navigation pane. o Multiple subheadings have been created in Appendices that weren’t there before (they existed as text, just not as headings). o It’s also incorrectly picked up formulas in Sections as subheadings o The hanging indent for the body text has moved significantly to the left, and the top margin has decreased. o The format of the signatures table has altered o Section breaks appear now in places where they didn’t previously. o The black line border at the base of Tables have partially disappeared. o Section breaks appear to have been entered in to the Appendix Tables o A section break has been moved into a footnote in Appendices Yes, I know Word isn't the optimum solution and email transfer is far from ideal. Currently looking at hosting the documents on a SharePoint site. Any advice would be appreciated. This is a long-term issue which we've been seeking a resolution to. |
#2
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Regardless of whether the destination PCs use the same Styles & Style definitions, that will have ne effect on how the document is formatted when it is re-opened on your computer. Evidently, some recipients are taking it upon themselves to change the formatting as well.
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Cheers, Paul Edstein [Fmr MS MVP - Word] |
#3
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You might turn on track changes to see exactly what they're editing.
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#4
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SharePoint (SP)
For whatever it may be worth, here's my corporate experience as the person in charge to proposal templates and DTP at my company.
For proposals, we use a few custom templates. The problem with SP is that the document gets divorced from the template. I have not found a way around this. Also, the writers and others working in the documents, outside our proposal management team, tend (understatement) to paste material straight from old douments, the web, Excel, wherever, with all the attendant styles coming with it. My experience is that heading numbering, bullets, etc. -- autonumbered lists -- get frequently stripped of the their auto feature, or it changes from number to letter or vice-versa, requiring me to reattach and reapply the correct template or, sometimes, individual styles from it. Later today, I will be taking a document, without it's final, empty paragraph, and porting it over to a fresh document based on the relevant template, because the stripping is happening about once an hour. I'll also be replacing stlyes that have accumulated seemingly endless names from character styles being created in paragraphs. Not the first time this has happened. I have posted here and elsewhere for a solution to this to no avail, given the other restrictions in the way our work goes. For example, it is not practical for us to restrict style changes completely in proposal documents. Years ago, back in the Word 2003 days, I worked briefly for a fellow who had spent two years working with MS to craft a corporate template that was locked. No styles other than company ones could be used; anything pasted in directly came in a Normal and had to have a style applied, which was done from a custom toolbar. This was only possible, because a self-extracting template was issued to each person working in a given proposal document, which then provided the style activation for the user on his or her machine. |
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formatting, styles, templates |
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