Hi Cindy,
I am exhaustively using IncludeText in my documents thanks to your article,
"How to Use IncludeText Fields" at
http://daiya.mvps.org/includetext.htm. I
was wondering whether XML would handle this issue better, but your reply has
set me straight. I'll continue using IncludeText.
Thanks! José
"Cindy M." wrote in message
news:VA.00000ad4.00b17070@speedy...
Hi Jose,
As a lone technical writer, I write and maintain several manuals (in MS
Word
2003) for products that share many features. Often I reuse content
between
these manuals. I am trying to decide whether I should use the XML
features
in Word 2003 (or 2007) to shared content between these manuals.
For example, I have safety information that is shared by all product
manuals. It would be wonderful to single source this info, so that an
update
to safety info could update all manuals. Also many of my manuals belong
to
product lines and all manuals in a particular line share much of the same
info.
Has anyone used XML in Word 2003 or 2007 to single source content? Any
advice as to how well it works for this purpose?
The XML features in Word don't really provide this, unless you're using a
transform to generate the documents dynamically.
More commonly, shared content is saved in one or more Word documents then
linked in using Insert/File (with a link). Under the covers, Word uses an
IncludeText field to manage the link.
Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org
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