List of referenced documents with automatic update

[yuraukar]

I am looking for a solution to the following problem:
I have a number of related documents - all MS Word files.
Each document has a list of references to all or some of
the other related documents, currently this is a manually
typed in bullet list.
It is pretty difficult to keep track of the version and
modification date of each document, so I need a solution
where Word automatically updates the list with the
modification date of the referenced documents, e.g. via
Ctrl-A + F9 or when saving/printing the document.

 

[martinique]

One approach: use a spreadsheet to keep a master list of documents, latest
version, issue date.
Format it nicely and embed it in your Word documents as the References list.

If you want to do it with automatic links in your documents, you could use
IncludeText fields.In each document define bookmarks for text showing the
Version and ModificationDate. Your references lists have a set of fields
like { INCLUDETEXT SourceFile Bookmark } for each document and property. [Be
a lot of work to set up and maintain, I think...]

 

[yuraukar]

The { INCLUDETEXT SourceFile Bookmark } sounds good for
me. Actually all my documents have some document
information included on a title page. I can easily mark
those "fields" I would like to include in the reference.

However, I tried the following and it didn't work:
File 1: Insert Field SaveDate, mark it, insert Bookmark
and name it "SaveDate". Save File, select all, update,
the file shows the current date 7/31/2003 3:27 PM.
File 2: Insert Field Include Text of File 1,
Bookmark "SaveDate".
File 2 doesn't show the save date of file 1,
but "0/0/0000 0:00 AM" !?!?!
This shows me, that Word actually finds the bookmark
(otherwise an error is displayed), but displays its
contents wrong.