[premington]

Greetings--new user; first post!

I have a rather sophisticated feature I'm trying to do in Word, but don't
know how to accomplish. I'm a technical writer and produce the user manuals
for our company. One product has sixteen different variations of the same
manual, 95% of which is the same with subtle differences peppered throughout
the document.

I have a new manager who has asked me to automate the structure of the
document so we have one manual that can be constructed as any one of the
sixteen variants on the fly. I don't know how to do this in Word. The idea
is to manage updates only on one document rather than the way were managing
updates now. Currently, one update has to be replicated sixteen times. This
has a huge impact on our development time for documentation updates.

My manager suggested Mail Merge, which looks useless for our use. The
problem is, the changes could affect the header, footer, in some cases
graphics, text within the body of the document, and this all could affect
pagination.

Does Word offer an advanced feature to manage content so one manual can
actually be sixteen different manuals and a user can automate the way in
which a manual content is constructed?

I appreciate the help!

-Paul