I recently posted a question about using Master Documents
and received excellent feedback. The replies highly
recommended not using this feature.
I have a follow up question regarding this. Here is the
situation:
1) The customer still wants to create a large document
which could be around 1000 pages.
2) The customer wants many people to be able to work on
different parts of the document throughout its development.
3) Seeing that Master Documents is not the recommended
course to follow...Does anyone have a suggestion on how to
proceed with this large document and its development?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated !
Jugglertwo

Alternatives are

IncludeText fields, which pull existing documents into a combined document,
and once set up can easily be updated to reflect the most recent version of
the linked documents (create by Insert | File with box checked to Link).

And

RD fields, which will build a TOC, etc, out of separate documents. For an
example, see
Creating a Table of Contents Spanning Multiple Documents
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/P...cle.asp?ID=148

Steve Hudson [Word Heretic] has an extended article on how to make Master
Documents work safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ma...dhomepage.html

DM


On 2/22/05 7:26 PM, "Jugglertwo" wrote:

I recently posted a question about using Master Documents
and received excellent feedback. The replies highly
recommended not using this feature.
I have a follow up question regarding this. Here is the
situation:
1) The customer still wants to create a large document
which could be around 1000 pages.
2) The customer wants many people to be able to work on
different parts of the document throughout its development.
3) Seeing that Master Documents is not the recommended
course to follow...Does anyone have a suggestion on how to
proceed with this large document and its development?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated !
Jugglertwo

2) The customer wants many people to be able to work on
different parts of the document throughout its development.

Note that the comment above is a recipe for disaster! This is because
most people do not know how to use styles properly and won't even try
to do it right...versus piling on direct formatting. This...added to
trying to use master docs means that your customer is just setting
themselves up for disaster. They will spend tons of time trying to
clean up the formatting that everyone messed up or will spend many
more hours blaming Word's Master Docs for trashing their files...when
THEY will be the ones that messed it up due to way too much
style/formatting confusion!

Wanna know how many times I've had clients pay me to fix the above
scenario?g

Do yourself a favor...keep your butt covered with these notes and your
warnings so when they don't listen to you, you'll have the material to
back yourself up and say "told ya so!"g

I would strongly suggest that you lock each and every chapter with
Track Changes and password it. This way you can at least have a
papertrail to go back to figure out who screwed up the formatting in
each document by checking the formatting notes through 2003.

Won't help the cause much, but it'll give you a nice trail for
fingerpointing!smirk And you'll also know who needs the Word lessons
the most.

Good luck...you're gonna need it!smile

Good luck...

Dian D. Chapman, Technical Consultant
Microsoft MVP, MOS Certified
Editor/TechTrax Ezine

Free MS Tutorials: http://www.mousetrax.com/techtrax
Free Word eBook: http://www.mousetrax.com/books.html
Optimize your business docs: http://www.mousetrax.com/consulting
Learn VBA the easy way: http://www.mousetrax.com/techcourses.html



On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:26:43 -0800, "Jugglertwo"
wrote:

I recently posted a question about using Master Documents
and received excellent feedback. The replies highly
recommended not using this feature.
I have a follow up question regarding this. Here is the
situation:
1) The customer still wants to create a large document
which could be around 1000 pages.
2) The customer wants many people to be able to work on
different parts of the document throughout its development.
3) Seeing that Master Documents is not the recommended
course to follow...Does anyone have a suggestion on how to
proceed with this large document and its development?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated !
Jugglertwo