make sense of large doc

[alex]

I have an Access database with a few reports...

One of the reports I publish w/ Word. It's about 200 pages and
basically lists a supervisor's name and his/her respective employee w/
some statistical data. Each page contains a supervisor and a
different employee; so, e.g., no two pages contain the same employee,
but many pages have the same supervisor.

I'm trying to provide easy navigation/printing of this document by
creating a table of contents or document map of some sort. I'm
running into a problem, however, because Word does not recognize the
supervisor's name as a heading or outline level. It would appear that
I have to select each supervisor and create a custom heading of sorts
(which would take too long and I update the doc every month).

Does anyone have an idea on how to take a long Word doc and make it
more user friendly given the example above.

Picture a Word doc about 200 pages w/ a particular employee's
information (by supervisor) on each page. E.g., the first five pages
have supervisor John Doe's name at the top with his five employees on
page 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The next five pages have supervisor Jane
Doe's name at the top with her five employees on page 6, 7, 8, 9, and
10.

Any thoughts? Thanks...

alex

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Brainstorming:

1) the document map will assign outline levels. If switching into the
document map assigns the right levels, and shows the supervisors and
employers in the map, you can build a TOC from those outline levels. I
don't know that depending on the Doc Map is so reliable, but....

2) You might investigate whether Access has any setting that would apply
the heading styles when you export. I think if you send a slideshow from
PPT to Word, it will automatically apply Heading styles. Perhaps there
are some flags you could set in Access to make the same thing happen, or
some way to set up the report including the formatting. Note: I've never
used Access and have no idea whether this is feasible (Or if Word lets
you mail merge from an access database, you can apply the formatting to
the field before merging the data)

3) Alternatively, if the doc is set up like so:
Supervisor: Name X
Employee: Name Y
it might be possible to use the consistent appearance of Supervisor to
format all lines with that text in Heading 1, etc. It would probably be
some sort of complicated Find and Replace, possibly involving wildcards.
If it's possible, it could be saved as a macro to easily reapply the
Heading every time you regenerate the report. You'd probably want to ask
in a VBA/programming Word group about that.

 

[alex]

Brainstorming:

1) the document map will assign outline levels. If switching into the
document map assigns the right levels, and shows the supervisors and
employers in the map, you can build a TOC from those outline levels. I
don't know that depending on the Doc Map is so reliable, but....

2) You might investigate whether Access has any setting that would apply
the heading styles when you export. I think if you send a slideshow from
PPT to Word, it will automatically apply Heading styles. Perhaps there
are some flags you could set in Access to make the same thing happen, or
some way to set up the report including the formatting. Note: I've never
used Access and have no idea whether this is feasible (Or if Word lets
you mail merge from an access database, you can apply the formatting to
the field before merging the data)

3) Alternatively, if the doc is set up like so:
Supervisor: Name X
Employee: Name Y
it might be possible to use the consistent appearance of Supervisor to
format all lines with that text in Heading 1, etc. It would probably be
some sort of complicated Find and Replace, possibly involving wildcards.
If it's possible, it could be saved as a macro to easily reapply the
Heading every time you regenerate the report. You'd probably want to ask
in a VBA/programming Word group about that.










- Show quoted text -

Daiya - thanks for your help; i'll give theses some thought.