Cross Referencing Across Multiple Documents

Question

I am working with two documents.  Document 1 has a section number that I need to reference in Document 2 (that's overly simplified, but essentially the problem).  Doing this manually would be near impossible given the size of the documents and the ever-present potential that the section numbers may change each time I use the documents.  I can create a cross-reference within each document.  Is there a way to create a cross-reference between the documents?

Answer 1

Hi Caitlion,

There is a round-about way of doing this.

First, open the source document and insert a cross-reference to whatever it is that you're wanting to referfence. It's probably best to do this in the page header or footer, so that the cross-reference is less likely to be deleted accidentally.

Next, select the cross-reference and press Ctrl-F9 to embed it in an empty field, thus { cross-reference text }. Fill in the field so that you get something like:

{SET XREF cross-reference text }

This uses a SET field to create a bookmark named XREF holding your cross-reference. Then press F9 to update the field. Note: the field will probably disappear when you do this (which is why it's vulnerable to accidental deletion).

Finally, open your target document and insert an INCLUDETEXT field pointing to the bookmark in the source document. See Word's Help file for the details.

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Cheers,

macropod MS MVP - Word