

Open a blank document with the page layout options set as you want them. But another way to get this particular macro is to record it: Allen's macro is perfectly fine if you already know your object names and a bit about VBA. So unless that is what you want, tell the person to go back and uncheck that option when done.Ģ. Automatically updating styles is a great way to force a document into consistency, but it prevents document-level style modifications from 'sticking' (it looks like it works, but all their changes go away when they save and re-open the document). Two comments from someone who uses this frequently:ġ. No amount of automatic formatting will compensate for manually looking through each page of a document to assure that everything appears as it should. Why? Because there may be some relatively small but important difference in between documents that gets clumsily messed up by being overridden when applying the common formats. You should understand that any time you attempt to do any "mass formatting" across documents, you run the risk of messing the documents up in some unforeseen way. Each file is opened in turn, formatted (with your supplied formatting commands) and then saved again. All you need to do is display the folder whose files you want to process, and then click on Open. When you run the macro, you will see a regular Open dialog box. You can copy these commands from a macro where you recorded the formatting steps, if desired. To use the macro, you need to replace the "Do formatting here" comment with the actual commands that do the formatting you want done to each file. The framework for such a macro is as follows:Ī FileName:=JNameĪctiveDocument.Close SaveChanges:=wdSaveChanges

These need to be either updated manually on a document-by-document basis, or done as a whole through the use of a macro. Thus, things like paper size, margins, header and footer locations, and orientation are not affected. The other thing that is not updated when you attach a new template is information contained in the Page Setup dialog box. You will still need to go through the document and manually apply the styles from the newly attached template. If the document does not utilize styles, or if the character formatting in the document has been explicitly overridden (in other words, the user selected text and used the Font dialog box or ribbons to format text), then attaching the template to the document will have no appreciable effect on the text. There are a couple of big caveats to this, of course. For instance, if there is a Body Text format in both the document and the template, the style definitions in the template will override those in the document, thereby standardizing the appearance of the document. What does this mean? It means that the appearance of anything formatted with styles in the current document will be updated to reflect styles with the same names in the template. These six simple steps apply the formatting in the template to the open document. (How you do that depends on the version of Word you are using and has been covered in other issues of ExcelTips.) If you don't see the Developer tab necessary for step 1, then you need to make the tab visible.

The tried-and-true method of standardizing the formatting of information in a document is to simply use styles. It can be frustrating to work with documents where everyone has a different idea of what looks "good" on a printed page. If you routinely receive documents from different people, you may be wondering if there is a way to format the documents so they all look the same.
