maintaining different editions of same doc in Word

[David Irwin]

I am creating a number of documents that I want to be able to use with
different target audiences in Kenya and Tanzania (and possibly Ghana). It is
intended that the core material will identical, but I want to be able to do
different country versions. This means that I need different contact info on
each doc, though I assume that I could do that with mail merge. The tricky
bit is that I want to be able to insert different logos – both on the cover
page and, ideally, as a washed out version on alternate pages.

Better still, I would like to automate all this so that changing from one
version to the other only requires a quick choice in a dialogue box or from a
menu. I fully accept that it would be easier just to write the complete
document and then do the changes, but the document itself is for training
programmes and is likely therefore to need to keep being changed as we get
more feedback.

Any ideas or tips would be greatly appreciated.

I am using Office XP (also known as Office 200) and Vista


David Irwin

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

One way to do this is with IncludeText and IncludePicture fields. When you
change the linked text or picture and update the field, it will reflect the
different content. To some extent you can do this with DocProperty fields,
but document properties cannot contain graphics. AutoText entries can do all
of these things, so an AutoText field can be useful, but it's a lot of
trouble to change AutoText entries.

Ordinarily with an IncludeText or IncludePicture field, you would update the
actual file that is being referenced (if only by renaming one of several
files), but you can equally well use Find and Replace to substitute a
different file path in the field itself.