Stylizer
Format, Fix Up and
Intelligently Apply Styles to Word Documents
Stylizer was developed to assist users in quickly reformatting Word documents by intelligently applying Styles that reflect firm standard template designs. This includes e-mail attachments, documents that have been scanned, or those that were converted from WordPerfect to Word with Levit & James’ popular CrossWords document conversion utility.
Best Practices
The key to using Word properly, especially for large or complex documents, like those found in law firms, government agencies, and other document-intensive industries, is to take advantage of templates and paragraph styles. Once a document has each paragraph in the proper paragraph style, editing and reformatting a document becomes much easier and faster. Stylizer can take any poorly formatted Word document, which typically does not use paragraph Styles properly, and completely reformat and apply your organization's standard styles in minutes. Without Stylizer, this will take hours of manual labor, and most users will not take the time to do it.
Stylizer can accomplish the application of Styles and common reformatting options (such as eliminating blank paragraph marks, or tabs and spaces in front of a paragraph), quickly and accurately, by automating formatting tasks that users would otherwise have to complete manually. Stylizer also reduces the risk that you will miss paragraphs or inconsistently apply styles to new paragraphs.
Common Uses for Stylizer
Any time a document needs to be reformatted and stylized, Stylizer will do it in minutes. For example:
1. When migrating from an older version of Word
2. When implementing a new Macro Package and need to take your older documents and move them into your new Templates and Paragraph Styles
3. When receiving documents from outside your organization by email or other means
4. When using our CrossWords utility to convert from WordPerfect to Word. Although CrossWords will automate much of the application of Paragraph Styles, the final reformatting requires user input and can easily be done with Stylizer.
How Does Stylizer Work?
Stylizer features two separate wizards to help Stylize a document: the Whole Document Wizard and the Paragraph Wizard. Use the Whole Document Wizard if you wish to apply styles to the entire document at once; styles are applied to groups of paragraphs where the grouping is based on user-selected criteria. Use the Paragraph Wizard if you wish to make a paragraph-by-paragraph decision regarding what style to apply to each paragraph and/or are unsure what style to apply. This mode works analogously to Word’s own Find and Replace feature: apply a style to the current paragraph and find the next paragraph that meets the user-selected search criteria.
Stylizer PreProcessor
In addition, Stylizer includes a document preprocessor for documents that do not contain your standard styles. These may be documents that have experienced repeated conversions between WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, client work received via e-mail, and documents with several editors or an ambiguous editing history. As a best practice, these document types are generally copied and pasted as unformatted text into a new document. Without Stylizer, all formatting must then be manually re-created in the new document to restore its original appearance. This can be time-consuming work, particularly in the case of lengthy documents with heavy formatting requirements.
The Preprocessor automates this document reformatting, and takes hours of work and translates it into a 5 to 10-minute project.
The Stylizer Preprocessor also has the ability to re-create document footnotes, endnotes and comments. It inserts tagged placeholders for graphics and tables. This greatly reduces the problems that occur with exchanged documents over time, and makes obsolete the time-consuming task of restoring document appearance with correct formatting.
After a document has gone through the Preprocessor, it can then be stylized using either the Paragraph Wizard or the Whole Document Wizard.