Differnet Views on Word Documents

[Roger Halbheer]

Hi All,

I documented a pretty complex process in Word that includes different
organizational roles. Now the request came to have kind of different views
on this document. I did this manually by saving the document with a new name
(process_role_a.doc) and deleted everything except for the paragraphs and
table rows that are relevant for this role. This bears the risk of having
inconsistent documents over time.

What I am looking for now is a way to automate this. One option is to mark
those paragraphs by the use of field or hidden text (something like
role_a_start and role_a_end) and then write a VBA macro that hides all text
not being between start and end.

Does anybody have a better idea to tackle this problem?

Thank you

Roger

 

[Jezebel]

Two thoughts:

1. Create a new style and apply it to the paragraphs that you might or might
not want to display. As needed, set the hidden property for that style's
font to true or false. If you want to get fancy you could create a macro to
do this, attached to a toolbar button.

2. Create a second document that consists of nothing but linked references
to paragraphs in the first document. (A quick way is to select the text in
document 1, switch to document 2 and use Paste Special -- check the Link
text box.) In theory, the second document -- if open -- will update
automatically whenever the first changes, although in practice it isn't
always so simple.

 

[Roger Halbheer]

Unfortunately it is a little bit more complicated than this:
I have more than one role (actually there are about 9-10) therefore the idea
with the hidden font does not help as this would only cover two of them
Roger

 

[Jezebel]

In which case the second approach might work for you; but with that level of
complexity Word is probably not the ideal solution. In effect you have a
data task, with Word as the output medium. You might be better off going the
whole hog and using a data-based solution. There are some off-the-shelf
products that do this sort of thing -- eg for creating proposals (in Word)
from selected standard paragraphs (stored in a database).