I have read the MVPs' warnings about the dangers of master documents. Can
anyone recommend a good alternative to master documents? I have 8
presentation documents that are comprised of multiple "recommendations." Some
of the recommendations are the same across all 8 presentation documents and
other recommendations may differ by a word or two depending on the audience
(banks or credit unions). My original plan was to create subdocuments out of
the recommendations and use the appropriate subdocuments to comprise each
presentation master document. Now I'm concerned about corruption issues with
master documents that may render the whole thing a big mess. My tests using
Master Documents have not gone well.

Alternatively, I've also wondered if there is a way to use formulas and the
mail merge feature to allow me to create If/Then fields so that I could have
one presentation file and just update the audience-specific fields by
choosing the appropriate code for an audience. For example, if my audience
was banks, then a field would read "customer" and if the audience was credit
unions, the field would read "member." This way, I could maintain just one
document instead of 8. I greatly appreciate any suggestions. I am using MS
Word 2002 SP3 and Office XP.