OS: Mac OS X
Word Version: 2004

My experience of Word has been limited to opening a new document and
writing a letter or two, with occasional curses when things didn't
'work'.

However, I have taken on an enormous job that requires a professional
knowledge of the programme. I have been reading everything I can, but
would like some advice on how to approach this job:

I have a number of long word documents (1 - 200 pages long), prepared
on different systems and by different people that I have to 'make into
one' long document which looks like it has been created by one person
- i.e cohesive look and feel and language.

This "one" document will be shared and worked on by three different
people (including myself), on different platforms and with different
versions of Word. Ultimately a PDF will be created for emailing the
document to others. I will be the person responsible for the
formatting of the document, although it's possible the others will
have do some as well.

In order to avoid reformatting as we work on the document I presume I
should:

- Create a document specific template which I attach to the document
and send to each person working on it
- Request that the "Automatically update styles on open" box be
unchecked
- Use unique styles throughout, (except default Heading styles that
come with Word)
- Not basing any style on "Normal" style

Questions:

Am I on the right track?

If I use unique styles, and the document has to be emailed to other
people who won't want to deal with handling a .dot document as well,
will the document still retain as much of the formatting as possible?

We do not know what the ultimate printer driver is. What is the best
way to handle this?

Thank you very much in advance,

Sandra