Create List of Effective Page

[Steve]

I have a large word document with various different sections and page
numbers. I'm required to put a list of each page number and it's effective
date.

Each page has a date manually typed in the footer. The page numbers are
fields that change depending the section.

I'm looking for a way to automate this process because invariable I make
human mistakes!

Thanks

Steve

 

[Jonathan West]

I have a large word document with various different sections and page
numbers. I'm required to put a list of each page number and it's
effective
date.

Each page has a date manually typed in the footer. The page numbers are
fields that change depending the section.

I'm looking for a way to automate this process because invariable I make
human mistakes!

Thanks

I suspect that you work for an organisation that still thinks it is the
height of good sense to have their operating manuals in a ring binder, and
to distribute updates by sending out a set of changed pages, and telling
individuals to swap out the superseded pages and put the new ones in the
binder in their place.

If this is the case, your human mistakes are the least of your company's
worries. Much more of the problem is that I doubt if as many as 5% of the
active copies are actually up to date. Do a quick audit and check.

The problem gets beyond that. The footer area contains text that is repeated
from page to page. So if you change the footer on one page by inserting a
new date, it will apply to surrounding pages as well. You can get round this
by inserting section breaks round the changed text in the body, but I would
recommend not doing that, because unnecessary proliferation of section
breaks increases the risk of the document becoming corrupt.

Your problems get worse. Suppose you insert a paragraph on a page, which
pushes text at the bottom of the page onto the next page. How do you know
how many pages you have to update? If you mess up, a possibly vital
paragraph of the manual disappears from the current printed version.

In short, Word is not designed to operate this way, and your company (if my
guess is right) needs to think about updating its document handling
procedures from the last time they were looked at, which I suspect was
sometime in the 1960s.

 

[Steve]

Thanks for that Jonathan. I'm actually writing a component maintenance
manual in the aerospace sector. My company and I are bound by the aerospace
specification ATA2200 for writing CMM's. The CMM is required to have a LEP.
I appreciate your advice on how we should write and manage the manuals and
I'll pass your comments onto the Air Transport Association of America.

Meanwhile do you have any knowlege on how I can automate the List of
Effective pages?

 

[Jonathan West]

Thanks for that Jonathan. I'm actually writing a component maintenance
manual in the aerospace sector. My company and I are bound by the
aerospace
specification ATA2200 for writing CMM's. The CMM is required to have a
LEP.
I appreciate your advice on how we should write and manage the manuals and
I'll pass your comments onto the Air Transport Association of America.

I'm well aware of the situation - I have done consulting work for a regional
airline (I shan't say which one) and found this precise problem. I'm not in
the least bit surprised that the issue you have is in the aerospace
industry.

You might want to check with the ATAA whether the LEP is in fact mandatory
if the manual is not in a ring-binder and is intended to be updated by
replacement of the entire document rather than of individual pages. In such
cases, an LEP has no purpose and provides no quality, traceability of
reliability benefit.

Meanwhile do you have any knowlege on how I can automate the List of
Effective pages?

Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible in Word, for the reasons I
explained before. With the regional airline I worked with, I managed a
kludge, to the effect that the printed copy was the master, and that the
Word document (with all pages showing the current date) was merely source
material for the update of the master paper copy. It was then possible to
use VBA to do a page-by-page comparison of the current and previous versions
of the document, and thus generate an update to the LEP. But it was a
substantial amount of code, and never worked well in the hands of the people
who were updating the manuals, who knew all about what needed to be changed
in the operating procedures, but were relatively untrained in using Word.

Eventually, they agreed on a change of approach, moving towards electronic
distribution of documentation, with whole-document updates, and got
agreement from their regulatory authorities that in such a circumstance the
LEP was unnecessary. A well-presented case to the ATAA should be able to
achieve the same result.