I work at a company that lives on procedures. Thousands of procedures. There are a number of template docs that are to be used and in general they are used; however, the documents have a complex format and keeping them looking correct consumes countless hours.

I am wondering if anyone knows of any MS Word compatible products that will take a document and reformat it to conform to a base template and possible some additional complex rules? The documents I am dealing with have embedded tables, figures, revision marks in the margin, rules where page breaks must appear, and more.
John

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.

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