Macro/formatting/thingie problem

My publisher has sent me a macro template - I hope this is the right term - and I'm uploading my book into it and formatting the whole thing to their specifications. I am pathetically untechie and this has taken me ages and much frustration to figure out (with help from patient and wonderful friends.) The publisher helpfully put all my existing text into the macro template they sent me, and I've finally applied all the proper formatting. I hope.

Now I'm copying more text - plus introduction, 240 photo captions and glossary - onto the template from my working document. I aqm using Word 2007. But, it pastes onto the template blue and underlined, like a hyperlink. Except it doesn't act like a hyperlink, mousing over it doesn't give me the "open this link" box, etc. It's just blue. And underlined. I cannot figure out how to fix this. I can't delete it from the template and try again, because the program won't allow me to delete anything. I've googled and read through techie forums, but clearly this sort of thing is not my forte and I get confused easily!

At this point my only option is to start all over again, figure out how to make it paste like normal text and reload and reformat. I really, really don't want to do this. It will take hours and I've already had about a week of frustration figuring this all out. There were bewildering complications at every step of the way. Oh yeah, and I promised this would be delivered tomorrow (Dec 22) for their copy editor to shred edit.

If anyone can point me in a useful direction I will send wine, brownies, roses or cash.

Straight lines. And I don't think it is a hyperlink - right clicking doesn't give me that option. It just gives me the option to turn selected text into a hyperlink.

alleycat said:

Are the underlines straight or wavy?

Also, have you tried right clicking the text and selecting Remove Hyperlink? Or does this do nothing?

Click to expand...

Regular copy and paste. At least I assume so; I don't know what Paste Special is. I did one section using copy > paste, another with the keyboard. Same deal.

Yes. Well, I tried removing the underlines, that made them bold instead. I tried turning the font black, and it simply wouldn't. When I apply the macros, the size and font type change correcly, but the blue and underlining remain.

Times New Roman, font size 12. Is there somewhere else I can look? I am brand new to Word 2007, just installed it last week. It's quite different to old versions of Word, or Open Office, which is what I've been using for seven years. (Oo would not allow the macros, so I had to buy Word.)

Thank you for helping, BTW!

Huh - it says the text is black, underline style: none, and nothing is checked. Hmmm. So the macro document is "seeing" the text as normal.

I tried the unformatted text tip, still came up underlined blue.

I have to go shovel snow and run errands. So much for getting up at 4 am to figure this out before I had to leave! Agh. It will probably be a long night tonight.

Thanks so much for helping! I'm impressed by people who have made the effort and understand a lot of the more convoluted technical stuff. I've owned computers for 12 years and still feel like a total neophtye sometimes.

alleycat said:

Would you be willing to e-mail me a small section of the document? Just copy to a new name and leave just a couple of pages where the blue text shows up.

Click to expand...

I would, but not sure how to copy just a part to a new template, because it's been precoded by the publisher with about half my main body text included.
And I love you and all, but don't feel comfortable sending out most of a first draft to anyone except my agent/editor/publisher at this point!
I will see if I can figure out how to make a partial document...unfortunately I have to go battle the elements and get some non-writing work done for a while. Much as I would prefer to stay home and get this figured out.

Yannow, when I was hired to write these books, I thought all I'd have to do was, umm, write. Gah.

ETA: Just talking with my wonderful patient friend who has also been helping me with this. She suggests the template is coded to record any changes or additions as blue underlined text. I made a minor change to the existing text, and it is blue and underlined. So perhaps this is a feature actually put in there by the publisher, and they just didn't tell me? Their instructions for doing all this have been fairly scant.

An update, in case anyone is having the same issue and this thread shows up in a search.
The solution was really simple, in the end.
The "track changes" tab opens a setting box. In my case blue/underlined font was the default setting for any changes. I changed it to no underline/black. I also unselected the "record changes" option, which let me make any changes to the document without leaving a litter of crossed out words.
Phew. I don't know why it was frustrating us so much - even my editor couldn't figure this out at first.