Creating Documents that are Mostly Common

C

cpotts

I have been asked to look into a way to make our procedures easier to manage
and I am wondering what the best thing is that Word has to manage this type
of thing. With the current setup I have the same document in multiple sites.
When looking at the documents they really have about 90% that is common with
just a few paragraphs that differ between them.

Is there some way that I could define a "master document" that has the
common things defined in it. With a kind of a place specific text here
section. So when I update the common document it just updates all the
documents.

The ideal solution would allow me to define something like

Common paragrah one... blah..blah.

Common Paragaph two... blah blah

Specic Paragraph one....blah blah.

Common Paragrah three... blah. blah.

Specific Pargaph two...blah blah.


One option to do this would be to insert linked documents but each of the
common sections would be its own document. This would work just a little
cumbersome and I am thinking there may be an eaiser way.

The master page functinality built into .NET2005 is exactly what I am
looking for but that is quite a bit of overkill for a normal user.
 
G

garfield-n-odie [MVP]

You could put the boilerplate stuff in a common document, and then use {
INCLUDETEXT } fields in other documents to bring in parts of the common
document.
 
C

cpotts

I was experimenting with that earlier and I couldn't figure out how to make
it update automatically. The only way I could make it update when the base
document changed was to right click the field and say update. It worked but
people are busy and it would only be a matter of time before they forgot to
update a section. The linked files are nice that way because when it opens
it refreshes all the links.
 
Top