>>>>Hi,
>>>>
>>>>I have a fairly large document (about 40 pages) that I have written when I knew nothing about styles. (Actually I still know very little about styles :)). But now I want to re-style this document. Mainly I want to have 4-step headings: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Heading 4. Therefore, everything will look consistent and when I click on Document Map button the document would look nice and structured. My question is, do you recommend that I create the new styles and add them to the existing list of styles of these document and then go through and changing headings from whatever non-styles they are to my new styles? Or is it better to delete all styles from the existing document (and there are tons of them for some reason) and start from scratch?
>>>
>>>I think it's the same - you can always show only styles in use, so you get a filtered view on the styles. Just untag every paragraph - or whichever tool you have that will remove all formatting - and then just go about it. BTW, if you use outline view in Word (don't know what you're using, and doesn't really matter), you can just assign levels by tabbing and shift-tabbing header paragraphs and they automagically get assigned Heading 1, 2, etc. Or assign hotkeys for the same thing - ctrl+1 or alt+1 for heading 1 etc. That would speed up the process - just hunting for the combo, dropping it, scrolling, clicking... is too much work if you have to do it dozens of times (as I'd assume you'd have on 40 pages).
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>>Thank you, Dragan. I have learned something already; I didn't know I could see only styles in use (missed that choice).
>>
>>But I don't understand what you mean by tabbing/shift-tabbing header paragraphs. Sorry if I am missing something very obvious.
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>Tried only in Word up to 2003, so I guess it should work in 2007 - haven't tried there, and didn't find the option in OOo.
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>In menu/View, select Outline View. You get pretty much a flat treeview of your paragraphs. You can still read/write/edit, clipboard works etc in this mode, but there are a few special keys - I think navigation and selection behave a bit differently (when you expect to select to the end of line, it goes to the end of paragraph or some such). The most important change is that the tab and shift-tab now behave as indentation keys. Just press a tab on a previously unmarked paragraph, and it gets tagged the same as the last Heading paragraph above; if no such thing, then Heading 1. Press again, and you demote it - from, say, Heading 3 to Heading 4. Ctrl+shift+N should unmark a paragraph, i.e. tag it as body text IIRC (haven't done this in a while). If your H* tags are set to auto numbering, you can see the numbers shift as you go. Shift tab promotes - from Heading 3 to 2, for example.
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>Just play with it for a while. There are also a bunch of buttons for filtering the display (say, "don't show anything lower than level 5").
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>This is more helpful when writing a new text, where you can outline the stuff before getting to the details, set the headings before even touching the body, and it's actually easier to move pieces of text around if you're moving them as invisible, by moving only their headings (and the text follows, unseen).

I use Word 2003 too. Now I see a lot of what you are saying. I have never before used Outline View. My problem is that my entire document is so messed up, no rhyme, logic, or nothing. Just text with various font sizes but nothing is "tagged" as Heading 1, 2, etc. I have to go through the entire text and work on it. And I think I know why I am having such a mess. I started this document years ago with conversion from Word Perfect. And I probably never used styles in Word Perfect so I started with a mess and I end up with total mess :). Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.