Automating compilation for distribution

[Frank Wood]

I have a user with an interesting challenge. She takes board meeting minutes
and needs to easily distribute (or exclude) different parts of the meeting to
different people based on their relevance to the subject. But the final
document (which would be a compilation of the parts sent to each
person/group) would ultimately be merged into one document so it looks
professional. (I don’t want to send 4 different files to 1 person.) The
Meeting Minutes might begin looking like this:

"VOTED: Blah blah etc.

VOTED: More Blah

VOTED: Even more Blah"

Where the 1st and 3rd “Voted†should got to Person A, B and C, the 2nd and
3rd should go to Person D and E and All of them should go to Person F. The
resulting document would be customized to each group/person with additional
information typed. An introduction or whatever. She has a fairly large
number of these meetings per month that need to be distributed.

I originally thought about setting this up as some kind of mail merge but am
unsure how that might work with this scenario. I also considered setting
this up as a Master document with subdocuments, albeit, I’ve read so many
horror stories that this feature scares me and I’m also not sure it would
meet the needs.

Any suggestions are MOST welcome! Thanks in advance! Sorry for the cross
posting in MAC-Word.

Frank Wood

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Frank,

Which version of Word are we dealing with? Should this be something the user can
handle manually, or would macros also be acceptable.

Right off-hand, without thinking about it too much, I might consider creating sets
of styles, with a base style per condition type. Change the "hidden" property of
the base styles according to whomever should receive the information.

Another possibility, if you'd want to keep this information in separate files,
would be to use IncludeText fields (rather than a Master Document) in combination
with If + (DocVariable or DocProperty fields). The If would check a value stored
in a document property or document variable and include / exclude a document
source accordingly.

The problem with both these approaches, of course, is that the information would
still be accessible to the recipient. Although one could unlink the IncludeText
fields (to turn the result into plain text) before sending the document on.

I have a user with an interesting challenge. She takes board meeting minutes
and needs to easily distribute (or exclude) different parts of the meeting to
different people based on their relevance to the subject. But the final
document (which would be a compilation of the parts sent to each
person/group) would ultimately be merged into one document so it looks
professional. (I don’t want to send 4 different files to 1 person.) The
Meeting Minutes might begin looking like this:

"VOTED: Blah blah etc.

VOTED: More Blah

VOTED: Even more Blah"

Where the 1st and 3rd “Voted†should got to Person A, B and C, the 2nd and
3rd should go to Person D and E and All of them should go to Person F. The
resulting document would be customized to each group/person with additional
information typed. An introduction or whatever. She has a fairly large
number of these meetings per month that need to be distributed.

I originally thought about setting this up as some kind of mail merge but am
unsure how that might work with this scenario. I also considered setting
this up as a Master document with subdocuments, albeit, I’ve read so many
horror stories that this feature scares me and I’m also not sure it would
meet the needs.

Any suggestions are MOST welcome! Thanks in advance! Sorry for the cross
posting in MAC-Word.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Frank Wood]

Cindy,

Thanks for the response! You raise some terrific possibilities!

1st allow me to answer your questions. Word 2007 and yes Macros/VBA are
fine.

Here is what I am thinking... Is there a way to embed some sort of hidden
field/check boxes that could be used as a trigger to either include/exclude
or even format as hidden text the following paragraph depending on the
"master trigger" of which distribution group this would be sent to? Could it
somehow look like this?

Master Dist check box that would be used as the master trigger.
Person A, B, C etc with one box each.

then some blah blah stuff that most everyone would get.

Then another Person A, B C etc with one box each that controls hiding or
displaying the following paragraph based on the master check box
Voted1 blah blah.
And so on…

Since she is creating a PDF file for distribution, hidden text would be fine
I would think. And when I say check boxes, it could be a drop down or field…
Whatever. Just some sort of control.

Either way, Thanks for the suggestions!

Frank Wood