Style Separator

Word 2002 and Word 2003 include a long-awaited feature: the Style Separator. The Style Separator is a special, hidden (and undocumented) paragraph mark. Rather than creating a paragraph *break,* however, it marks the spot where one paragraph style ends and another paragraph style begins--*all in the same paragraph.* That's right--starting with Word 2002, you can use two or more paragraph styles in the same paragraph.

Why should you care? Mainly because it gives you more control over what's included in a table of contents. Let's say you're editing a manuscript whose first chapter begins like this:

"Paris, City of Lights. After an excruciating ten-hour flight, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where my daughter was waiting with a large cardboard sign bearing the inscription 'Dad.'"

Since Word will create the table of contents from the Heading styles you've applied to your chapter headings (Insert > Reference [in Word 2002 and 2003] > Index and Tables > Table of Contents), you try applying the Heading 1 style to the paragraph. But that's no good, because you don't want the entire paragraph to show up in the table of contents. All you want is "Paris, City of Lights."

The workaround for this problem in earlier versions of Word was to break the paragraph in two:

"Paris, City of Lights."

"After an excruciating ten-hour flight, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle International Airport . . ."

Then, after applying the Heading style to the first paragraph, you would select its carriage return (paragraph mark) and format the return as Hidden text (Format > Font > Hidden). You might then have to insert a space to make everything look nice. And when you inserted the table of contents, sure enough, only the first bit would be included. Yes, you can still do that if you don't have Word 2002 or 2003.

If you do have Word 2002 or 2003, however, you can now use Word's built-in Style Separator instead of a hidden paragraph mark. First though, you'll have to drag it up from the storehouse of hidden Word commands and make it available on a menu, toolbar, or keyboard combination. You can learn how to do so here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707444986

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707286867

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1713088939

The name you're looking for on the Commands list is InsertStyleSeparator. Okay, I'll make it easy for you:

1. Click Tools > Customize.

2. Click the Commands tab.

3. In the Categories list, click All Commands.

4. In the Commands list, scroll down to InsertStyleSeparator.

5. Drag InsertStyleSeparator to the Formatting toolbar.

6. Click the Close button.

To actually use the Style Separator, you'll still have to start with the paragraph split in two:

"Paris, City of Lights."

"After an excruciating ten-hour flight from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport . . ."

Then follow this procedure:

1. Place your cursor anywhere in the text of the first paragraph.

2. Create a Style Separator (which will be inserted at the *end* of the current paragraph and not at your cursor position) by using your new toolbar button, menu item, or keyboard combination. The two paragraphs will magically become one, with the Style Separator between the two.

3. Select the text before the Style Separator and style it with the Heading style you want to use in the table of contents.

When you generate your table of contents, the text before the Style Separator will show up there, but not the text after it.

By the way, you can actually see the Style Separator (it looks like a regular paragraph mark with a thin dotted line around it). To do so:

1. Click Tools > Options.

2. Click the View tab and put a checkmark in the All checkbox under Formatting Marks.

3. Click the OK button.

Note that if you open your Style Separator document in an earlier version of Word (97, for example), your Style Separators will become nothing more than hidden paragraph marks. Hmmm. Maybe the Style Separator isn't so revolutionary after all.

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READERS WRITE

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent a terrific tip for creating a printable list of document properties without opening the document:

I accidentally found an article on Microsoft's MVP Site called, "Using VBA, how can I get access to the Document Properties of a Word file without opening the document?" The link is:

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/DSOFile.htm

This document has a link to a MS Knowledge Base article which has the DSOFile download. The article also has a link to a template to download and put in the Word Start Menu. When you do this it puts another option on the Tools menu to run the List File Properties. You then have to select which document properties you want to be listed. Bingo! The result is a table listing the document properties of each document in the folder. Actually, it only lists Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Fortunately for me, most of my documents are Word or Excel.

I have my document properties set up in the footnotes such as file name, subject, comments, author, etc. I wanted to keep an index of all documents so have manually entered the document properties for nearly 3,000 documents into an Excel spreadsheet. But now that I have the DSO file and template, I can run it to list the properties which I list in the spreadsheet and in the same order so that all I have to do is copy the table and paste it in the spreadsheet.

I keep all my new documents in the same folder until I have enough to put on disk. From now on, when I copy them to disk, I will run the properties list, paste it to the index, then either delete the documents or move them to another folder. That way, I will be sure that no document appears on the index more than once. The great thing about the Excel spreadsheet index is that I can sort by subject, or whatever.

This DSO file is going to save lots of time for me!

Many thanks for the great tip!

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RESOURCES

Inquisitor, from Word guru Steve Hudson, detects and reports corruption in Word documents. Here's Steve's description of the new program:

Inquisitor is a tiny tool for MS Word 97+ by the Word Heretic www.wordheretic.com. It uses two different methods to report on the levels of document corruption within the content of your document. Version 1 has no fancy graphics--it is a bare-bones report of the active document--but it is free.

The larger your document, the longer the report takes in a direct linear relationship. On a PIII machine the speeds are quite acceptable in that it is not worth getting up from your desk for reports on documents up to several hundred pages. Extensive advice for getting your code to run as fast can be found in the Word VBA Beginner's Spellbook from www.wordheretic.com.

When strange things start happening in your documents, or your sense of Word paranoia kicks in, click the button on the toolbar and you will have one of two reactions:

Oh, my document is not too corrupt; it must be something else. I'd better ask the Tech Whirlers for help:

http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/

Struth! Let's get started on some cleaning.

The actual cleaning of the document is left up to the user. The www.wordheretic.com site provides numerous goods and services for treating document corruption:

* The Word Spellbook has a manual cleansing procedure.

* The site offers a cleaning service for rapid, thorough cleansing of documents at the standard hourly rate.

* The site will offer an Enterprise edition tool to completely rebuild libraries of documents and templates.

Installation

Extract the template to a Word startup directory; full instructions are in the template if required.

For a limited time, the template is available from the Editorium. You can download it by clicking here:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/inquisitor.zip

Thanks to Steve for making this program available.