Setting the default to your liking

Stuart - I would really like to see the ability to add List Styles to either the Quick Styles or the Styles Window (task pane) Dawn Crosier

List styles are important enough that they have their own gallery -- the multilevel list button next to the traditional bullet and numbering pair. A list style is either independent of paragraph formatting (except for indents) or is associated with specific paragraph styles (which can be shown in the UI as you desire).

Is there some way i can make do the work that i want it to do? The styles, bullets and numbering seem uncontrollable. For instance, i updated the TOC in my document and the entire document's bullets and numbering got messed up. I spent a lot of time trying to set the styles, bullets and numbering and when i open the document next time, some of the bullets have disappeared and some styles have changed. It sucks when i have to waste so much time to do a simple document. Any links to how this can be controlled. I am using word 2007.

Hi Venkat - What build of Word 2007 are you using? Can you provide the affected file? - Jonathan

Is there any way that my documents will automatically open to default with out me having to change it by highlighting and formatting. I know there is a "Clear formatting" function, but is there a way any document recieved and opened will automatically be opened as default?!

Another issue--

Cross-reference fields in footnotes that are set to show above/below references do not show "above" or "below" but the entire caption instead. Above/below fields work, however, when they are NOT in footnotes. I have selected the incongruous fields (in gray) in the screenshot. See www.francispickering.com/footnote.png

Note that the field codes in the body and the footnote are identical, and the problem only affects the above/below option (the screenshot shows all 5 "Insert reference to" options; the first 4 are fine.)

Hi Nelly - There is unfortunately not a way to do what you describe. What type of custom default would you like all of the documents you open to reflect? Is this to ease reading? If so, does Reading Mode help at all? -Jonathan

Thanks again Francis. I’ve reported this to the necessary parties. -Jonathan

Hello, I was trying out the new word 2007 and was wondering why the default equation keyboard shortcuts were gone. For example pressing Ctrl+f would give you a fraction, Ctrl+t:s would give you a summation. I have found that it is much harder in this new version to use \sum and \int for those features. Is it possible to implement or provide an addon feature for the short-cut keys for the old style equation editor again?

Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the response. I think I am using MS Word 2007 RTM version. I have faced similar problems in Word 2003 too. I can give a copy of that file i guess. I actually removed the TOC and recreated and that problem of updating TOC got resolved. But i still have othe problems where i try to include create a new bullet point or a numbered statement, the whole document will be filled refreshed with every statement being made a bulleted statement or a numbered list. I could send you a file with the problem. Please do let me know how i should send that to you. Sorry for the delay in responding to you. Thanks

Hi Harry - Jennifer Michelstein is the program manager that worked on equations and is currently taking some much deserved time off. I’ve passed along your question for Jen to field when she gets back. Sorry for the delay - Jonathan

Hmmm...that's really interesting as I'm evaluating Office 2007 for our company! Is there also a way to set a default style during an unattended deployment? To figure this out I tried to record a macro when setting the default but nothing was recorded. Also I cannot just distribute a customized normal.dotm since autotext entries must be migrated from the Word 2000 installations to the new normal.dotm. Is there a way to migrate the old normal.dots while automatically setting a default style?

I'm one of those blue background fanatics and I've tried getting the blue background as default. I've made a custom template that gives me a blue background and white text, and tried saving this as my default "Style" but every time I open a new file I still have to choose my background color. It is only one button click, but it is frustrating that I can't get the program to open up with the background I want. Is there a way to do this?

You would need to open the Normal.dotm file and set the background there. The background is not saved as part of the theme in Word 2007. You could also set your system window colors to be white on blue, which would then apply to the default Word document (which uses the standard Windows window colors for text and background).

as to both migrating AutoText entries and setting defaults in the new Normal.dotm, one approach is to deplay a Normal.dotm with the properties that you want it to have (including the default style set) and then programatically move the autotext entries. Normal.dot is kept intact and still available after the install. Alternatively you could force the migration of Normal.dot to Normal.dotm and then programatically open that file and set the theme via activedocument.ApplyQuickFormatSet(" "). note that many autotext behaviors have changed so you may wish to reimplement your solutions using the newer UI and methods.