Cross posted:
microsoft.public.word.docmanagement,
microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs

I'll set f'ups accordingly if anyone has a suggestion
for the best or a better place for this post.

WinXP Pro, Office 2002, Word97 and 2002 installed,
living well together.
Normal load of av, spyware et al protection, firewall,
everything up to date and functioning well. No known
machine/app problems; clean system, near's I can tell.
Single User, not shared. Have a home LAN, but am
not working across the LAN; have to be in the office to
work on these where I have all my references handy.
I really only need the ability to use the TOC links
and manipulate the locations and levels of the various
chapters and subchapters, or, in other words, document
navigation/manipulation. Being able to select x levels
to view is very helpful and will get used a pretty fair
amount of the time.
----------------

I am in the process of digging out some long-stored
documents for various reasons. They are mostly
Word6.0/95 era, and several are Master Documents.
I'm familiar with Master Document problems, and have
and will likely still experience problems with them.

In "playing" around as I prep to actually work on a
couple of them, I've been looking for ways to avoid the
master documents, and think I've found a relatively
easy solution, but ... as with most "easy" things,
thought I'd pass this by some people who might have a
lot better knowledge basis than I.

-- I open and then Save the master documents in WD 2k2
format. OK, fine.
-- Closed WD, reopened it, and reloaded the just saved
documents.
-- It took me about fifteen minutes to trash the first
Master Document set.
-- Reloaded originals, tried again, took a little
longer, but screwed up the subdocs fairly readily.

-- Using WD97, I opened the same Masters, and have not
been able to trash the master or subs or anything else.
That's not a very scientific test though, and besides,
I want some of the capabilities of 2k2, so I really
don't want to keep them in an old WD format.

-- Checking thru the diffs btwn 97/2k2, they're VERY
different! OK, so maybe it's taken a step backwards,
dunno. So, I says to myself, "Self, what other
alternative might there be?"

-- That's when I thought of plain old Outline style.
-- Tried Outline, and Inserted the separate (copied
from archive, not the damaged ones) into the current
document in Outline View/format.
-- That worked pretty good, for three editing sessions.
-- On the 4th session, Word bailed on me, and stopped
responding but was using about 77% of the CPU time. I
gave it a good ten minutes and nothing changed, so
finally I ended the process to shut WD down.
-- All I lost was the last ten minutes (autosaves ON),
so that's not too bad. There was a one byte difference
between the original and the recovered documents, and a
file compare showed it to be a space at the end of the
file.

Now, Word 2k2 DOES stop responding on me at times,
though very infrequently. So, I'm not sure whether it
was Outline mode that caused that, or the mysterious
little son of a glitch that pops up every once a month
or so.

So, here's my question/s:

Forget about WD97: It's present for other purposes. I
don't wish to use it here.

Word 2002:

-- Is Outline mode any better than Master Document
mode?

These docs will range in size from 300 to about 700
pages, so I don't believe the all-in-one approach of
Outline mode will hurt anything.
I have one 858 page doc that's no problem but it's
not setup or usable in Outline view, though it could be
someday. No problems with it.
I have another VERY large, in Gigabytes size,
document of only about 200 pages with a ton of graphics
in it. It's also no problem to work with unless you
want to start at the bottom of it; then it takes a
moment or so to display, but nothing unbearable.

-- Is there any particular reason to NOT use Outline
View, basing the Outline levels mostly on Headers, for
a document?
It looks like I might at the most, use 5 or 6 levels
and of course a TOC, Table of Figures, etc., and
eventually an Index.

-- And finally, if Outline does have some recognized
pecularities, how about using Open Office for this
purpose?
I was about to fire it up when I realized how much
time I was spending on all of this and I started to
wonder if I'm reinventing a wheel, so to speak.

So, I thought I'd give you guys here a try and see
what comes of it. I've seen some great work here.

Thanks in advance for your shared opinions and
experiences.

Pop

PS - Yes, I've read the several posts on Master
Documents, but I didn't notice much of anything
referring to Outline for a similar purpose.