Changing Styles Across Multiple Files

Question

We have a lengthy catalog that we build in spreads. We don't make a book file, since the pages are all sent individually to our prepress people, and we also have pages that copywriters use to create the copy in the first place.
Every piece of copy in this book is set up on character and paragraph styles. We start with a master template, so all the styles have the same names.
We're almost done with the whole thing, and then today we find out from the Office of Secret Self-Important Ivory Towers that they have chosen new fonts for us and not told us what they are until now, so now we have to change every single font from the top down.
Is there any way to synchronize the styles without building a book file? It's not the end of the world if that's what we have to do, but it won't work for the writers' files, and it's going to require a lot of manual tweaking to keep it from shuffling pages everywhere.
We're on CS4, by the way.

Answer 1

If all of your documents share the same style names, then you can do this relatively easily without using the book features.
Although it is easier to do this by using the book features, what you need to do is open the document that you consider to be your source or master document. Make all the style changes as needed and save it.
Open the next document.
Go to the Paragraph Style panel
In the panel menu, select Load All Text Styles... (this loads Paragraph and Character styles)
Select the master document.
Allow the incoming styles to override any existing styles of the same name.
Cleanup any text as needed, save and close.
Repeat for all other documents.
If you have object styles, use the same proceedure with the object style panel.
If you have swatches that change, you can Save Swatches from the master file, then Load Swatches in the other files.
Note: this would be far easier to do by temporarily adding all the documents to a book (be sure to disable any auto page numbering in the book) and then Sync from the book panel.
HTH
-mt