To force formatting in your Merge Templates, you need to define styles within your MS Word file.
When creating a new Merge Template, there may be times where you need to enforce certain styles for your output. To enforce those styles, you may need to define styles in your MS Word template.
A good example of this may be on a Meeting output, such as a Meeting Minutes document. Let's say the end result that I am looking for is something like this:
You can see in the example, the "This Meeting Notes" text is larger than other areas of the document and the "Previous Meeting Notes" text is smaller that other areas.
After adding my merge tags, the document looks like this:
To make sure these styles don't get overwritten during the merge process, you will need to define the styles in MS Word. To do this, follow the steps below:
1. Highlight the text you want to define a style for. In my example, I will highlight {$field.projectteam_1318} first.
2. In the "Styles" section of your MS Word ribbon menu, select the more dropdown and then click the "New Style" icon.
3. In the "Create New Style from Formatting" window, type in a new name for your style. Use something that makes sense, like "New Meeting Notes". You can see I also defined the font family, font size, and you can choose other formatting options such as bold, italic, and underline.
4. Click "OK" to save. Repeat this process for any other formatting rules you want to define. In my example, I might do this one more time and define a new style called "Old Meeting Notes" which would be font size 8 and italic.
5. Now just save your MS Word document and finish creating your Merge Template in ProjectTeam. Your formatting should stick to what you have defined.