Style Cleaner

What it is and why it exists

Requirements rarely start their life in DOORS Next. They are pasted from Microsoft Word, imported from ReqIF or Excel, or copied from e-mails. Each of these sources brings hidden formatting along: fonts, font sizes, colours, line spacing and margins that are stored inside the text of the artifact.

The result is a module where every paragraph looks slightly different, documents generated from it look unprofessional, and text sometimes becomes unreadable in another theme. Removing this formatting by hand means opening every artifact in the rich-text editor. Style Cleaner was created to do that for a whole module in one pass.

Problems it solves

• Specifications with mixed fonts, sizes and colours after imports from Word, Excel or other tools.
• Published documents and reports that inherit the foreign formatting.
• No way in the standard interface to see which artifacts carry hidden formatting, or how much.
• Manual clean-up that takes hours on large modules and is easily left half done.

Benefits

• A consistent look for every artifact, in DOORS Next and in every document generated from it.
• Transparency first: the widget shows which artifacts contain formatting and which properties are used most (for example fonts or colours) before changing anything.
• Whole modules in one run, without the 200-artifact limit of selections.
• Only formatting is removed. Text, tables, lists, images and links stay exactly as they were.
• Evidence: an Excel change report records every cleaned artifact.

How to use

1. Open a module and click Find artifacts with styles. The widget shows how many artifacts it checked, how many contain formatting and the most used properties.
2. Click any artifact in the list to see exactly which formatting it carries, and Show in module to jump to it.
3. Click Remove styles (N) and confirm. Progress is shown in Execution Status, and you can stop at any moment.
4. To clean only some artifacts, select them in DOORS Next and click Clean N artifacts in the Selection section.
5. Download the change report from Execution Status if you need a record of the run.

Good to know

• Run Style Cleaner in a change set, so you can review the result before delivering it.
• Highlight in module selects all affected artifacts in DOORS Next without changing them, for example to review them first.
• Typical moments to use it: right after an import, before a review, and before publishing a document.