I've just created a brand new template for our company. All is fine, except people paste in material from older document. In doing so, they copy in styles, including broken styles (in older documents, Heading styles had bizarre suffixes) & section breaks (which means pages with different margins).



I note in Word 2007 that when I paste text from an old document into a new one, I'm not forced to choose whether only destination styles are used. How is that functionality forced "on"? If I can't do that, is the only solution to force people to paste from older documents as plaintext only?

Regards,

P.

EDIT: A bit more info; in Word Options, I set my Cut, Copy Paste settings as follows:



Yet when I copy from another doc, the styles from that doc are still copied in. These settings _seem_ to have no affect.

P.

This has been discussed in another forum (more specifically in a Microsoft forum). Basically, this can be done in recent versions of Word if you apply formatting restrictions to a document or template.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Hi, oceanclub. Word 2007 and 2010 added the choices you highlighted, but as in most such machinations, the more the options, the more the possibilities for lines to get crossed. You have come across one of those situations. Stephan's advice is thus on the mark: you'll need to restrict the style options in documents folks get to paste into. This, of course, raises more issues and will mean educating those needing to work in the documents. If you can do so, great; this is not always practicable. And frankly, I'm not sure how it would work in these newer versions. In 2003, one could create a special toolbar with the desired styles -- headings, bullets, text, and so forth. This is not practicable in 2007, and I'm not sure how it would be implemented in 2010, which at least allows ribbon customization. It might be left to instructing authors in the Styles pane or style formatting box which can be placed on the Quick Access Toolbar, though this is severely limited.

Best,
Ulodesk

The options for restricting formatting are described, rather briefly, in this article:

Restrict or permit formatting changes
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...712.aspx?CTT=1

This is not at all completely safe, as it can be circumvented, but it makes it a bit harder to introduce undesired formatting in a document.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional