URGENT: Paragraph/Character style help (doing massive amounts manually)

Question

I'm using CS3 at work but if it's magically easier, i may have access to cs4 (less likely but possible). It's a long post but I wanted to be in  depth with my problem which at its core is simple. I have included a 2-page spread example in pdf.
What I greatly need help with is your opinion of how I can set this up to speed up the process, unify the document, and make future edits simple instead of crazy difficult. Can I configure a paragraph style to NOT replace font style? Can that style include my preset tabs (for bullets) which list as follows?:
number, small letter, roman numeral, bullet
Let me start by saying I SCOUR the net and all available options before posting.  I'm cleaning up/editing a production manual for a portrait company I work for and am new to indesign but have figured many things out. I'm quite proficient with the Adobe Suite and computers. I'm using last year's indesign file and it was done very poorly. The words are right, the lines are right, the tabs are terrible and i've needed to move many pages out of order and add plenty. I also chose to disable 1 text box that flows from page to page (i see now it's helpful but they had made it impossible for me to use the existing one and I didn't have time to redo). The pictures I can add and manipulate freely but an embedded text-wrapped version would be nice as well (less important by far).
The manual is spiral bound with text on the right page and a notes page on the left for the layout. (flipped open the left side is lines for notes and the right side is operations). It's set up with a Header at the top (in some cases a sub header almost identical right below it), a space or two, then an outline format IE:
1)     Open job
          a) Go into G:\Location
          b) Select job code
               i) *Note: Be sure to select the right one (etc)..
2)      Continue
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |                    Picture                      |
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |______________________________|
Page size is 8.5x11 with a .5 safe print border all around (document is 11x17). The Document is about 100 pages of written directions (so double that for indesign pages). It will be printed on a Xerox IGen3.  The whole book give or take is set up like that. Thus, a few paragraph and character styles are in order. I've been editing/cleaning up each page re-tabbing, re-laying out. It's hell and must be done in 2 days.
I'm using Myriad Pro universally as the font.  The sizes are as follows:
Header: 16 bold center
Sub (if applicable): 15 bold center
Body: 12 point
I've gotten paragraph styles to work sort of. I tried setting up numbering and bulleting but it's been giving me so much grief that I typed those all by hand or have just adjusted existing ones (I don't have much time currently, BUT need to learn for future updates and to convert it to styles). I know styles are the way to go with a couple master pages involving bulleting and character styles... however I could not become an expert overnight unfortunately; i tried =)
The real killer for paragraph styles have been:
- The portions of the directions that pertain to specific menu options or clicks are in bold, occasional important info is red. Normal text including numbers/bullets are normal. There are many words repeated that need bold so perhaps some kind of search/replace script could help however im not positive.
- When I go to apply a paragraph style it must make all type bold or not bold. It doesn't replace the color of the text which is good.
-  Having major trouble with bullets/numbers working the way i'd like.

Answer 1

It is unfortunate you only have two days, but you could play around with these suggestions below and see if they help more than they hender... (NOTE: SAVE A COPY OF THE DOCUMENT BEFORE YOU START MONKEYING AROUND IN CASE YOU HATE THE RESULTS!)
For starters, you could certainly do the lists via stylesheet. It would require 3 lists based on your sample. Base list 2 and 3 on list 1 or all 3 on a default List paragraph style, so that you can globally control your list formatting without having to change all 3 each time you want to apply a tweak.
List 1 would be leve 1, 1,2,3 style with indents like 3p, -1.5, 3p. Align right and don't restart numbers. If you want bold numbers, make a bold character style called List# and apply it.
List 2 would be level 2, a,b,c style with indents like 4p, -1p, 4p. Restart on level change.
List 3 would be level 3, i,ii,iii style with indents like 6.5p, -1.5p, 6.5p. Restart on level change.
Tweak as necessary to match your actual text.
Then just do a global GREP search and replace, replacing out the manual list numbers with real styles.
List 1 replace ^\t[0-9]+\t with ~- (discretionary hyphen is a nice invisible character that won't break anything) and paragraph style of list1.
List 2 replace ^\t\t[a-z].\t with ~- and paragraph style list2.
List 3 replace ^\t\t\t[ivx].\t with ~- and paragraph style list3.
The last step of list replacement would be to manually restart numbering for each new list.
As for the keywords, unless you have a complete list of what will be bold and it will always be bold, just manually style them with character styles.
Make a character style called "Keyword" and apply bold to the formatting.
Make a character style called "Keyword Important" and apply bold and red formatting.
If you know certain words are always, always the same and you have CS4, you could create a GREP style that applied Keyword character style to any words that matched.
For example, if the keywords Left, Right, Top, Bottom always were bolded at the beginning of the paragraph, you could add the GREP style that applied Keyword to ^(Top|Bottom|Left|Right).
In all likelihood you will be applying a lot of manual keywords too though, so make sure you put a keyboard shortcut on (like cmd-opt-1, 2, etc) on the Keyword and Keyword Important character styles. That way you can just fire through selecting text and whacking cmd-opt-1 where appropriate.