
Templates most often contain styles and sometimes macros that you want to use in another document. In Word, a template is a document, stored in a special format, that is used as a pattern for new documents. The bottom line is that you'll want to be quite careful using this method, or else you won't get the results you expect. In other words, the formatting is copied and "painted," but the style in the target remains unchanged.


The contents of the Clipboard-the paragraph you copied from the source document-are pasted into the target document. (I often jump to the end of the document and press Enter a few times, then press the Up Arrow once or twice.) Now press Ctrl+V. Switch over to the target document and position the insertion point somewhere in the document where you won't mess up anything already in the document. (This is essential.) Press Ctrl+C to copy the paragraph to the Clipboard. When you select the paragraph, make sure that you include the end-of-paragraph marker at the end of the paragraph.

Now, select a paragraph in the source document to which you've already applied the style you want to copy. (You probably could figure this out, but the source document is the one from which you want to copy styles and the target document is the one to which you want to copy them.) Just open your source and target documents and make sure both are visible on the screen at the same time. If you only have a few styles to copy from one document to another, an easy way to do it is to use the editing tools with which you are already familiar. With that in mind, I want to take a look at those "several ways" that I mentioned. As to which of those methods is "best," it depends on which one you find to be the easiest. You see, Word provides several ways that you can copy styles from one document to another.

Sounds like a simple question, right? Well, not really. Maria wonders about the best way to copy styles from one document to another.
