I often get documents sent by others that I need to convert to my default template. (I’m a magazine editor.) Currently I have to go to Styles and Formatting → Styles actions → Load Styles from Template, then choose the template, select “Overwrite,” and click OK.
Is there any way to automate that process? Even better, to also convert “Default Paragraph Style” paragraphs to “Text Body” — another manual process I have to go through with most documents?
Thanks for any suggestions!
Re 1. You might start a new document based on your default magazine template and then insert the file(s) sent to you into it. The styles in the document will then adjust to the style properties in your template.
Re 2. You can use the Tools - AutoCorrect - Apply to replace the Default paragraph style with the Text Body style (and much more that you can configure in Tools - AutoCorrect - AutoCorrect Options).
There are in fact two questions here.
Template
If I understand correctly, you receive documents which already have a template by not yours. You can change the template with the Template Changer extension. You can also set a template when the document has none.
This has the same effect as loading the styles as you do.
However, your question assumes that the document is already styled and these styles have the same name as yours. In which case, formatting is immediately updated. If this is not the case or the document is heavily direct formatting, you’ll have to manually clear direct formatting and apply your styles to paragraphs and words, not speaking of page styles.
Default Paragraph Style
The mere fact you ask about Default Paragraph Style shows that the documents are not styled and are probably direct formatted. As you know this style should never be used for discourse as its role is to define attributes shared/forwarded to all other styles.
Edit>Find & Replace has a mode in which you can search for a specific paragraph style (unfortunately it does not support character styles) and replace it with another paragraph style.
And, as always, these tricks will work and produce a stable document only if it is saved .odt.
I looked at Template Changer, and while it certainly works it doesn’t really streamline the process. I might be asking for too much — a one- or two-click method of applying the default template.
As for the “Default Paragraph style” issue, you are correct — I don’t want that style to be used for exactly the reason you stated. (I kinda wish there was a way not to use it at all, but that’s another issue.) I wasn’t able to get Find & Replace to fix it, but I haven’t given it more than a quick try. Applying the template was my bigger issue. I might have to look at programming a macro…
Thanks for your help!
It can do the trick for all files in a given folder. Just copy all the files in question into one folder and run File>Templates>Change template (folder).
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Thank you! I’ll give it a shot. Still not quite what I was looking for, but a step in the right direction.