My two bob's worth:

1. Create a Style Sheet that defines what styles are used for what purpose.
DO use the built-in styles. There's nothing to gain by creating your own
unique style names; it just makes more work. At this stage don't worry about
the actual format of those styles (that's very easy to change later). What's
important is that all the people working on it use the same style *names*
for the same purposes. Eg, every chapter starts with a 'Header 1', the TOC
will use Headings 1, 2, 3; style X is used for table heads, style Y for
captions, etc etc.

2. Leave the formatting till last. Don't try to get it right as you go. With
different people working on it, especially with different platforms and
different printers you will otherwise waste a lot of effort. Get all content
right, with the document correctly structured. In practice, composite
documents like this always need a final 'graphic edit' anyway.

3. Don't worry about what templates people use. Pull all their contributions
together, then apply a single template of your own making. Provided they've
used standard style names, the final formatting will be a relatively
straighforward task (or rather, it will make little difference what template
they used).

4. If the document has embedded graphics, make sure these are delivered as
separate files, of standard size and resolution. Even if you are embedding
the graphics, always keep a separate file copy.




"Sandra Jensen" wrote in message
om...
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