Multiple documents with common text

Question

I run some holiday cottages and each has an information booklet which is regularly updated. About half the text in the booklets is the same for each cottage, and half is individual for that cottage. Is there a neat way of managing this so that I only have to update the common text once for all the booklets, preferably without copying and pasting it all as the common text is in different places in the document.

Answer 1

Place the common text in a separate document. Then in each of the booklet documents, insert an INCLUDETEXT field that contains the path and filename of the common text document. When that field is updated, it will pull in the text from the common text document. Read https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/includetextfields.htm for instructions.

If there's a chance that you may want to move the documents to a different folder or drive, or to a cloud storage location, refer to https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/38722-word-fields-relative-paths-external-files.html for a way to avoid having to change the path in the fields.

Answer 2

Jay's method is likely to work fine for you.

An alternative would be to save the common bits of text as AutoText or another building block and insert it in your documents using an AutoText field.

AutoText