On 02/02/2018 05:20 AM, Ianseeks wrote:
I think this is where i went wrong. Is there an obvious indicator that
shows its direct formatting as opposed to a style? It would be handy
when picking up someone else's document (which is what happened here)
I'm not sure that there is. In my career as a lawyer (I'm now retired),
I often had to share documents with other people. We had contracts going
back and forth with each side adding and subtracting edits. By the end,
it was a formatting nightmare with styles and direct formatting all
clashing with one another. Sometimes the document would get so corrupted
it would crash the word processor.
Usually, once the substance was completed, as a last step in the
process, I would reformat the entire document (because I'm obsessive
about these things, and I really enjoy doing it). I would start by
stripping all the direct formatting (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-M), and then I would
go through and apply all of my own paragraph styles. Nobody ever
complained because the finished product usually looked pretty good and
was readable.
It doesn't take as much time as you might think. After stripping the
formatting, I would then press Ctrl-A again to select the entire
document, and then apply the most predominant style (typically my
BodySingleIndent). I would then go through the document and apply
special styles to the appropriate paragraphs, such as a Heading1 or
Heading2 for headings and subheadings.
After I retired, I briefly taught a Law Office Technology course at the
college level. For an exercise, I would give my students a plain text
file and then tell them to format it to make it look like a given
finished product, that I would give them in hard copy form. After they
would spend twenty minutes wrestling with direct formatting, I would
then demonstrate how do do it in about 45 seconds using styles.
In my current teaching position, I have given my students a book report
for an old book that is now in the public domain. To keep them from
having to buy the book, I downloaded the pure text file of the book,
inserted it into LO and reformatted it using my styles. I pressed Ctrl-A
and applied BodySingleIndent to the whole text, and then went back and
applied a style called Heading1 for each chapter title. By using
Heading1 for the chapter titles, I was then able to automatically
generate a table of contents, and then I created a title page with some
other special paragraph styles. The whole process for a 188 page
(letter-sized) novel took me no more than 15 minutes, and that was only
because I had to examine each page to find my chapter titles or other
paragraphs that needed special styling (such as a block quote, etc.).
Learning Styles is definitely worth the investment in time.
Virgil
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