Creating Multiple documents with common sections

Question

I am looking for some feedback on a challenge I have come across.  Here is what I am trying to achieve:

I need to create 7 documents that share some common sections.  My goal is to create the common sections someplace that will allow me to update the common sections in one place and these changes automatically get update in each of the 7 documents.  I realize I can insert objects (i.e. Text from file or bookmarks) and it will work, but here are the issues I am seeing:

• My 7 documents have "numbered lists" and the common sections end up in different places through out my 7 documents.  For example, in Document A, the Specifications section would be numbered 5 (with subsections under this) and then in Doc B, the specificaiton section is 8.  If I embed a document, I cannot update the numbering between docs.

-  When I embed a document, I seem to have formating issues.  I might be able to resolve this, the issue above still prevents me from doing this.

I have considered putting all of this in Access and creating a report for each document (with approriate cross refernce tables to identify the sections numbers and what content would be included), but this is more work than I have time for right now. 

I was just looking for suggestions.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi ProcBizGuy

You can do this using INCLUDETEXT fields. In the document containing the common material (the source document, bookmark each portion that you want to be able to refer to in the other documents. Then, in the target documents, where you want the text replicated, insert an INCLUDETEXT field pointing to the relevant bookmark in the source document. See Word's help file for more details.

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Cheers,

macropod MS MVP - Word