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#1
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Advice for variations on a document?
Word 2003, Win XP Pro SP2
I have several variations on my resume: volunteer work shown or not, different objectives, and so on. These affect maybe a total of 5% of the text, in four or five places. Right now, each variation is stored as a separate document. The problem is that most changes affect the common parts, meaning that I have to make them in each of the documents. I was thinking it could be easier to set up a single document and handle the variations by field within it. This doesn't feel like a mail-merge application to me. After some time with Word help, I've identified IF fields and SET fields. If I understand correctly, I could have one SET field for the variation name, then the other fields would reference it in IF tests to determine which text to display. After changing the SET field, I'd update all fields when printing. Does that seem like a reasonable approach, or am I missing something? P.S. What happens when I e-mail the document to someone? Is there an easy way to replace all the field codes with the current computed text? -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
#2
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Advice for variations on a document?
You could insert the common bits as AutoText fields, updating the AutoText
entries as needed. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Stan Brown" wrote in message ... Word 2003, Win XP Pro SP2 I have several variations on my resume: volunteer work shown or not, different objectives, and so on. These affect maybe a total of 5% of the text, in four or five places. Right now, each variation is stored as a separate document. The problem is that most changes affect the common parts, meaning that I have to make them in each of the documents. I was thinking it could be easier to set up a single document and handle the variations by field within it. This doesn't feel like a mail-merge application to me. After some time with Word help, I've identified IF fields and SET fields. If I understand correctly, I could have one SET field for the variation name, then the other fields would reference it in IF tests to determine which text to display. After changing the SET field, I'd update all fields when printing. Does that seem like a reasonable approach, or am I missing something? P.S. What happens when I e-mail the document to someone? Is there an easy way to replace all the field codes with the current computed text? -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
#3
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Advice for variations on a document?
Wed, 1 Mar 2006 17:58:50 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill
: "Stan Brown" wrote in message ... Word 2003, Win XP Pro SP2 I have several variations on my resume: volunteer work shown or not, different objectives, and so on. These affect maybe a total of 5% of the text, in four or five places. ... After some time with Word help, I've identified IF fields and SET fields. If I understand correctly, I could have one SET field for the variation name, then the other fields would reference it in IF tests to determine which text to display. After changing the SET field, I'd update all fields when printing. Does that seem like a reasonable approach, or am I missing something? You could insert the common bits as AutoText fields, updating the AutoText entries as needed. Thanks for the suggestion, Suzanne. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and maybe I'm just not understanding, but that seems like it would lead to a lot of maintenance. Using SET/IF would keep all the alternative bits right in the document. Using AUTOTEXT fields, if I understand the help message correctly, I'd have to retype the variable bits every time. Is that correct? P.S. What happens when I e-mail the document to someone? Is there an easy way to replace all the field codes with the current computed text? I think I've answered this for myself -- Ctrl-Shift-F9. For some reason I just wasn't doing the right search in the help file this morning. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
#4
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Advice for variations on a document?
Perhaps I've misunderstood what you were attempting. From your later
description, it sounds like you're trying to have a single document in which you can turn certain bits on or off. What I understood was that you had several different documents with varying (but overlapping) content. That is, that you had Document A, which had parts 1, 2, and 3; Document B, which had parts 1, 2, 3, and 4; Document C, which had parts 1, 3, and 4, and so on. Using AutoText or IncludeText fields for the content they have in common would mean that when this content needed to be updated, you could update it in one place (the AutoText entry or the file linked to the IncludeText field), and it would update in all versions of the résumé. If in fact you're trying to maintain this variability in a single file, then that's a different issue. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Stan Brown" wrote in message t... Wed, 1 Mar 2006 17:58:50 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill : "Stan Brown" wrote in message ... Word 2003, Win XP Pro SP2 I have several variations on my resume: volunteer work shown or not, different objectives, and so on. These affect maybe a total of 5% of the text, in four or five places. ... After some time with Word help, I've identified IF fields and SET fields. If I understand correctly, I could have one SET field for the variation name, then the other fields would reference it in IF tests to determine which text to display. After changing the SET field, I'd update all fields when printing. Does that seem like a reasonable approach, or am I missing something? You could insert the common bits as AutoText fields, updating the AutoText entries as needed. Thanks for the suggestion, Suzanne. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and maybe I'm just not understanding, but that seems like it would lead to a lot of maintenance. Using SET/IF would keep all the alternative bits right in the document. Using AUTOTEXT fields, if I understand the help message correctly, I'd have to retype the variable bits every time. Is that correct? P.S. What happens when I e-mail the document to someone? Is there an easy way to replace all the field codes with the current computed text? I think I've answered this for myself -- Ctrl-Shift-F9. For some reason I just wasn't doing the right search in the help file this morning. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
#5
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Advice for variations on a document?
Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:51:00 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill
: Perhaps I've misunderstood what you were attempting. From your later description, it sounds like you're trying to have a single document in which you can turn certain bits on or off. What I understood was that you had several different documents with varying (but overlapping) content. Right, what I have is the several documents (at last count, five) with varying but overlapping content. The overlap is the great majority -- maybe 90-95% of the text in the documents is identical. For instance, the "objective" line is text A in two versions of the resume, it's text B in two other versions, and it's text C n the fifth. In three versions I mention citizenship and in two I don't. In one I mention marital status and in four I don't. That means that any change in one variation (document) is likely to be in common text meaning that I have to open up all the other variations and make the same change. There's obviously great potential for error, not to mention the added effort. What want to get to is one document that can print in any of five variations. Essentially I want to "press a button" or in some way just make a change in one place to select which variation. This is why I thought SET and IF would do it for me. But I've never used them, and before getting into it I wanted to check if it was a reasonable approach or if I should be trying something else. The other thing I thought of was recording some macros to do appropriate search and replace, but that seems awfully cumbersome. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
#6
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Advice for variations on a document?
You might consider using AutoTextList fields for the variable content (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/AutoTextList.htm). These would give you a choice of a variety of AutoText entries for each component. You could then delete the unneeded components. If you create the résumé as a template, then you can create each version, on the fly as needed, as a document based on the template (you would need to do this if you used AutoTextList fields because inserting the AutoText entry deletes the field). Alternatively, you could use a UserForm to choose components to add. This of course would require VBA (which is outside my area of expertise). None of this is to imply that SET and IF fields would not work; I'm just not familiar with the SET field, and consequently other methods are more likely to occur to me. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Stan Brown" wrote in message t... Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:51:00 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill : Perhaps I've misunderstood what you were attempting. From your later description, it sounds like you're trying to have a single document in which you can turn certain bits on or off. What I understood was that you had several different documents with varying (but overlapping) content. Right, what I have is the several documents (at last count, five) with varying but overlapping content. The overlap is the great majority -- maybe 90-95% of the text in the documents is identical. For instance, the "objective" line is text A in two versions of the resume, it's text B in two other versions, and it's text C n the fifth. In three versions I mention citizenship and in two I don't. In one I mention marital status and in four I don't. That means that any change in one variation (document) is likely to be in common text meaning that I have to open up all the other variations and make the same change. There's obviously great potential for error, not to mention the added effort. What want to get to is one document that can print in any of five variations. Essentially I want to "press a button" or in some way just make a change in one place to select which variation. This is why I thought SET and IF would do it for me. But I've never used them, and before getting into it I wanted to check if it was a reasonable approach or if I should be trying something else. The other thing I thought of was recording some macros to do appropriate search and replace, but that seems awfully cumbersome. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
#7
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Advice for variations on a document?
Thu, 2 Mar 2006 10:35:02 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill
: You might consider using AutoTextList fields for the variable content (see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/AutoTextList.htm). These would give you a choice of a variety of AutoText entries for each Thanks Suzanne; it looks interesting. Alternatively, you could use a UserForm to choose components to add. This of course would require VBA (which is outside my area of expertise). None of this is to imply that SET and IF fields would not work; I'm just not familiar with the SET field, and consequently other methods are more likely to occur to me. Understood. I'll read the Autotextlist document more carefully and make a decision. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com/ |
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