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I was wondering if there is a feature in word to branch a main document into sub documents that are slightly differentiated from each other and the main document which is a catch all document. Additionally, it would be useful if changes to the main document propagated to the sub documents
As an example say there are two documents that are identical except on page five the image is different. To my knowledge this requires two different documents. Both documents require an update to text on page four, which is identical between the two documents. Does word support a feature that allows for updating both simultaneously? My explanation is simplified, in reality it would likely be 5-10 documents that are 90% similar.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
You could use Copy and then Paste Special and select the Paste Link radio button in the Paste Special dialog, probably pasting the text as Formatted Text (RTF)
Then, any changes that you make to the text in the source document will be reflected in the document to which you pasted the text.
That works as you describe, the problem is that it doesn't allow the OP to make one choice that will make a selection of alternate text in multiple locations in the document.
If I understand what the salamander want's to do is something like this
By setting a flag in one place, all of the the occurrences of the appropriate Specialist text is also selected. Maybe Mail Merge could do the trick, but I haven't used it myself so I don't know if it can be made to work that way.
***********
Text common to all docs
....
Pick one of:
Specialist text 1 ...
or
Specialist text 2 ...
...
Text common to all docs
....
Pick one of:
Specialist text 1 ...
or
Specialist text 2 ...
...
Text common to all docs
....
Pick one of:
Specialist text 1 ...
or
Specialist text 2 ...
...
Text common to all docs
....
*************
Lots of people have viewed your question since the first time I looked at it.
Short answer is, no, there are no native features built in to Word that I know of that can do exactly what you want.
There is a Master/Sub document feature that allows you to build a single document out of several "sub" documents. But there is no obvious provision for conditionally selecting alternate sub files.
There is the {RD} remote document field code that can insert another document, but again, no conditional processing that I know of.
The most likely option is probably a macro, but I don't know how to specifically do what you want.
Maybe one of the Word "experts" will have an idea that will work for you.