Legacy List Templates in Word

It wasn't really until Word 2003 that I used the terms List Templates with a complete understanding of what that actually meant.  By then I had become very familiar with Word's problem with multi-level numbering including all the methods and work-arounds as to how to resolve issues when list numbering went bad.

Prior to Word 2003, every time you added a bullet or a list number to your document, in the background code Word would record a list template - these templates were never removed from the word document - the problems began when the list templates started numbering over 200 in the document - then there would be instability, and eventually corruption would occur and the document would not open.

The main reason behind this "flaw" was that the geeks at Microsoft didn't really understand how Document Production actually worked.  They assumed, rightly or wrongly, that whenever users wanted to create a new document they would click on the File menu and choose "New Document".  They didn't realise that the majority of users out there would be daisy chaining their documents in that they would find a document already in existence that resembled their new file, then save this file as a new document and edit it.  Sometimes documents remained in use as semi-templates for decades.....

As well as Daisy Chaining, the other problem was simply copying and pasting.  By pasting the contents directly (i.e. formatted) into another document, users were invariably copying the document's history along with the text and formatting - and certainly they copied in all those list templates!  So doing something as simple as copying a few paragraphs from one document to another could easily send a document along the path to corruption land.

Document Production quickly rose to this challenge and began to utilise the now infamous "paste special - unformatted text" method -  those that failed to meet the list template challenge ended up losing their multi-page documentation.  I once got a job at a major American Law Firm solely on the premise that I would be able to create, maintain and supervise their documentation, particularly the large offering circulars that often grew into documents of several hundred pages or more.  Prior to my appointment, the firm had lost a multi-million contract because an OC had crashed and the client had opted to go with another firm (one with stable documentation).

Now I've come across thousands of documents showing signs of instability but probably only fifty or so that were actually, really, truly corrupt since those heady Word 2000 days.  Ever since Word 2003, Microsoft made a massive effort to ensure that documents created using this new package were stable.  We used to remove list templates from Word 2000 documents simply by converting to MS Word 2003, and then saving them back down again as Word 2000.  Boom!  All the un-used list templates in the document were deleted by doing a simple Save As.

Now we've come to the xml days.  Microsoft have told us that corruption issues are a thing of hte past - xml files don't go bad, they just.... well.... go awry (and 99% of the reason they have gone awry is that the users cannot find the relevant functions in the new ribbon setup with context sensitive menus popping up and disappearing just as quickly).

Okay, so now the little history lesson is over - how do you create and utilise list templates in Word 2010?  Well, probably the best overview of this I have found is Shauna Kelly's instruction guide - you'll find that here and I hope you commit it to memory.

You really cannot be calling yourself an office geek without knowing this kind of stuff backwards.