Master/Outline documents of substantial length

[PopS]

Cross posted:
microsoft.public.word.docmanagement,
microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs

I'll set f'ups accordingly if anyone has a suggestion
for the best or a better place for this post.

WinXP Pro, Office 2002, Word97 and 2002 installed,
living well together.
Normal load of av, spyware et al protection, firewall,
everything up to date and functioning well. No known
machine/app problems; clean system, near's I can tell.
Single User, not shared. Have a home LAN, but am
not working across the LAN; have to be in the office to
work on these where I have all my references handy.
I really only need the ability to use the TOC links
and manipulate the locations and levels of the various
chapters and subchapters, or, in other words, document
navigation/manipulation. Being able to select x levels
to view is very helpful and will get used a pretty fair
amount of the time.
----------------

I am in the process of digging out some long-stored
documents for various reasons. They are mostly
Word6.0/95 era, and several are Master Documents.
I'm familiar with Master Document problems, and have
and will likely still experience problems with them.

In "playing" around as I prep to actually work on a
couple of them, I've been looking for ways to avoid the
master documents, and think I've found a relatively
easy solution, but ... as with most "easy" things,
thought I'd pass this by some people who might have a
lot better knowledge basis than I.

-- I open and then Save the master documents in WD 2k2
format. OK, fine.
-- Closed WD, reopened it, and reloaded the just saved
documents.
-- It took me about fifteen minutes to trash the first
Master Document set.
-- Reloaded originals, tried again, took a little
longer, but screwed up the subdocs fairly readily.

-- Using WD97, I opened the same Masters, and have not
been able to trash the master or subs or anything else.
That's not a very scientific test though, and besides,
I want some of the capabilities of 2k2, so I really
don't want to keep them in an old WD format.

-- Checking thru the diffs btwn 97/2k2, they're VERY
different! OK, so maybe it's taken a step backwards,
dunno. So, I says to myself, "Self, what other
alternative might there be?"

-- That's when I thought of plain old Outline style.
-- Tried Outline, and Inserted the separate (copied
from archive, not the damaged ones) into the current
document in Outline View/format.
-- That worked pretty good, for three editing sessions.
-- On the 4th session, Word bailed on me, and stopped
responding but was using about 77% of the CPU time. I
gave it a good ten minutes and nothing changed, so
finally I ended the process to shut WD down.
-- All I lost was the last ten minutes (autosaves ON),
so that's not too bad. There was a one byte difference
between the original and the recovered documents, and a
file compare showed it to be a space at the end of the
file.

Now, Word 2k2 DOES stop responding on me at times,
though very infrequently. So, I'm not sure whether it
was Outline mode that caused that, or the mysterious
little son of a glitch that pops up every once a month
or so.

So, here's my question/s:

Forget about WD97: It's present for other purposes. I
don't wish to use it here.

Word 2002:

-- Is Outline mode any better than Master Document
mode?

These docs will range in size from 300 to about 700
pages, so I don't believe the all-in-one approach of
Outline mode will hurt anything.
I have one 858 page doc that's no problem but it's
not setup or usable in Outline view, though it could be
someday. No problems with it.
I have another VERY large, in Gigabytes size,
document of only about 200 pages with a ton of graphics
in it. It's also no problem to work with unless you
want to start at the bottom of it; then it takes a
moment or so to display, but nothing unbearable.

-- Is there any particular reason to NOT use Outline
View, basing the Outline levels mostly on Headers, for
a document?
It looks like I might at the most, use 5 or 6 levels
and of course a TOC, Table of Figures, etc., and
eventually an Index.

-- And finally, if Outline does have some recognized
pecularities, how about using Open Office for this
purpose?
I was about to fire it up when I realized how much
time I was spending on all of this and I started to
wonder if I'm reinventing a wheel, so to speak.

So, I thought I'd give you guys here a try and see
what comes of it. I've seen some great work here.

Thanks in advance for your shared opinions and
experiences.

Pop

PS - Yes, I've read the several posts on Master
Documents, but I didn't notice much of anything
referring to Outline for a similar purpose.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

[I don't think any follow-ups are necessary, having this available in two
places does not seem a problem to me]

I read your post kinda fast, so I may have missed something.

Is there any good reason to keep your chapters in different files? Since you
don't seem to be working with other people, why not just combine all
chapters into one file?

Though I have not studied Steve Hudson on using Master Documents safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/wordhomepage.html
I get the impression that you are never supposed to do any editing in the
master, but only in the subdocument. So you shouldn't spend much time in
Master Document view.

Your apparent question: Outline View vs. Master Documents? doesn't totally
make sense to me.

You didn't see anything about using Outline View to replace Master Documents
because it's irrelevant, more or less.

The alternative to Master Documents is combining in a single file. Outline
View makes this much easier, but it is simply a feature of Word, not exactly
something you implement as you do Master Documents. You switch in and out as
necessary--once combined, you can use Outline or Normal or Page Layout as
appropriate. Outline View makes dealing with long documents much easier, but
whether those documents are 30-page chapters within a book or the entire
book is beside the point, except that the longer the doc, the greater the
benefits of Outline View.

(see here just in case you don't know the full power of outline view
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLView.htm

It also kinda sounds as though you are editing the entirety of the work and
may need to move Subsection 3.2 from Chapter 3 to Chapter 4, in which case I
would say you definitely don't want to be using MDs, as my inexperienced
impression is that that's the type of thing that screws them up, when done
from the MD instead of via cut and paste from file to file. A single file,
however, can handle that fine, and Outline View makes it easier.

So far as I know there are no known issues with Outline View (except that to
print a collapsed outline you can't go into Print Preview first).

Hope that helps--I'm sure others will chip in.

Daiya

 

[PopS]

===> Inline please:

in message

[I don't think any follow-ups are necessary, having
this available in two
places does not seem a problem to me]

I read your post kinda fast, so I may have missed
something.

Is there any good reason to keep your chapters in
different files? Since you
don't seem to be working with other people, why not
just combine all
chapters into one file?

===> Actually, that's what I was trying to say. A
single file and Outline View seem to give me just what
I need, but then that bit with Word Stopped Responding
popped its ugly head so I thought I'd check with some
of the folks here. It happened again, so I did a Shut
Down/Reboot and tried again; maybe that fixed it; so
far so good.

Though I have not studied Steve Hudson on using
Master Documents safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/wordhomepage.html
I get the impression that you are never supposed to
do any editing in the
master, but only in the subdocument. So you
shouldn't spend much time in
Master Document view.

===> Same impression here. I suspect one has to be
more intimate with the internals of Word to actually
use MD, or at least have a strict policy to do so.

Your apparent question: Outline View vs. Master
Documents? doesn't totally
make sense to me.

===> Sorry, I was feeling pretty muddled when I wrote
that. Wish I could take it back and start over but ...

You didn't see anything about using Outline View to
replace Master Documents
because it's irrelevant, more or less.

===> That's what I was hoping to hear. It "seems"
irrelevant, but then MD wasn't an issue until some
folks started trying to use it in earnest.

The alternative to Master Documents is combining in a
single file. Outline
View makes this much easier, but it is simply a
feature of Word, not exactly ....

(see here just in case you don't know the full power
of outline view
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLView.htm

===> ?? I have read that, in fact, but didn't notice
anything about Outline view's powers. I'll take a look
again; I thought it was all MD info.

It also kinda sounds as though you are editing the
entirety of the work and
may need to move Subsection 3.2 from Chapter 3 to
Chapter 4, in which case I
would say you definitely don't want to be using MDs,
as my inexperienced
impression is that that's the type of thing that
screws them up, when done
from the MD instead of via cut and paste from file to
file. A single file,
however, can handle that fine, and Outline View makes
it easier.

===> Yes, that's exactly what I need to do, and a lot
of it. These are documents that were accurate "way
back then", but now need some substantial redesign.
The first time I trashed it with MD mode was moving
chapters around rather than recreate it; it's rather
long. And, I don't do macros so automating a rebuild
has to be manual for me. The second time I trashed it,
all I was doing was update the TOC. I was trying to
get an idea how the changes were looking. I guess you
recreate TOCs too with MDs. I used to be able to use
MDs in old versions, but apparently not now. I'm also
not too sure just what resaving all the docs to current
WD format does to MD things, either.

Thanks for the comeback,

Pop

 

[PopS]

"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]"

Hi PopS

I shall assume you have read everything else in this
thread, and make soe
remarks that may help: ===> Always open to that!

1) Word 97 has the "old" table engine. It will
cause less problems in old
documents, but it will not handle the nested tables
that can occur in Word
2000+ documents. It is not very robust if you need
to get into "mega"
documents.

===> Agreed. 97's only present because I used to use
it to initiate web pages before doing the final
dressups. It was quick for the mundane code and didnt'
bloat. It probably didn't even deserve mention. I
have much better tools now so it'll disappear when I
can "remember" to remove it.

2) Word 2000 is probably the professional's choice
for very long documents.
It lacks the speed and power of later versions, but
also lacks some of the
destructive bugs (sorry: "features") of the later
versions.

3) Word 2002 is a toxic soup of bugs. Don't use it
for anything
substantial.

===> Sorry to hear that since it's what I use, and have
for some time.
You sound pretty convinced but it's the first time I've
heard it; is there any "horse's mouth" I can verify the
details with? Not doubting you, just wondering what

4) Word 2003 is what I use when I need to get really
serious. Very fast,
very powerful, not quite as stable as Word 2000 but
the power makes up for
it. You have to know how to turn off the features
that cause problems.

===> lol, what's new there? Fortunately I'm not afraid
to do that and can usually figure out how.

If you have better than 512 MB of memory and Windows
XP on NTFS, you can
push Word 2003 to 5,500 pages in a single document.
If you do, you better
have a fast disk and be good at waiting. But it will
hang in there.

===> Woof! I've got the faster drives, but no 5500
pages in me!! I know what you mean though; even having
been trained to "hurry up and wait", I still am not a
good waiter!
Actually, I've been looking into the Includes:
They're new to me for some reason and I thought they'd
be more complex to use than they are, but it really
looks pretty simple once you get used to it. I might
experiment with that; I've only pulled about 80 pages
into the doc so far, so it's still in a copy/paste-able
state if I needed to recereate a few revised chapters
as separate files.

While you could follow Steve's article and use Master
Documents, I
personally wouldn't... It's a lot of work and I
would not select that
approach for your requirement. Single document and
Outline View is the way
I would go.

===> Steve's article actually looked good, but unless I
had a background approaching his, I don't think that's
the way to go either. His article was good, all due
respect to him, in that it told me how to "break" a MD,
which I did rather quickly thanks to him, and thus (he)
talked me out of using it. I want to concentrate on
the writing, not on the rules of the app I'm using.

But I would do it in Word 2003 on a grunty
workstation.

===> Well, maybe I've found a reason to upgrade; I'm
one of those who don't upgrade for the sake of
upgrading, but maybe I have a reason now. I'll have to
check with my CFO (li'l woman) and see how the
financials are. <g>

One thing I have figured out is I went from Outline
stages (note type outlines I mean) to wanting to see
final outcome too quickly. I should've practiced
delayed gratification a little longer I guess.

REgards,

PopS

Cheers

===> Inline please:

"Daiya Mitchell" <[email protected]>
wrote
in message

[I don't think any follow-ups are necessary, having
this available in two
places does not seem a problem to me]

I read your post kinda fast, so I may have missed
something.

Is there any good reason to keep your chapters in
different files? Since you
don't seem to be working with other people, why not
just combine all
chapters into one file?

===> Actually, that's what I was trying to say. A
single file and Outline View seem to give me just
what
I need, but then that bit with Word Stopped
Responding
popped its ugly head so I thought I'd check with
some
of the folks here. It happened again, so I did a
Shut
Down/Reboot and tried again; maybe that fixed it; so
far so good.

Though I have not studied Steve Hudson on using
Master Documents safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/wordhomepage.html
I get the impression that you are never supposed to
do any editing in the
master, but only in the subdocument. So you
shouldn't spend much time in
Master Document view.

===> Same impression here. I suspect one has to be
more intimate with the internals of Word to actually
use MD, or at least have a strict policy to do so.

Your apparent question: Outline View vs. Master
Documents? doesn't totally
make sense to me.

===> Sorry, I was feeling pretty muddled when I
wrote
that. Wish I could take it back and start over but
...

You didn't see anything about using Outline View to
replace Master Documents
because it's irrelevant, more or less.

===> That's what I was hoping to hear. It "seems"
irrelevant, but then MD wasn't an issue until some
folks started trying to use it in earnest.

The alternative to Master Documents is combining in
a
single file. Outline
View makes this much easier, but it is simply a
feature of Word, not exactly ...


(see here just in case you don't know the full
power
of outline view
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLView.htm

===> ?? I have read that, in fact, but didn't
notice
anything about Outline view's powers. I'll take a
look
again; I thought it was all MD info.

It also kinda sounds as though you are editing the
entirety of the work and
may need to move Subsection 3.2 from Chapter 3 to
Chapter 4, in which case I
would say you definitely don't want to be using
MDs,
as my inexperienced
impression is that that's the type of thing that
screws them up, when done
from the MD instead of via cut and paste from file
to
file. A single file,
however, can handle that fine, and Outline View
makes
it easier.

===> Yes, that's exactly what I need to do, and a
lot
of it. These are documents that were accurate "way
back then", but now need some substantial redesign.
The first time I trashed it with MD mode was
moving
chapters around rather than recreate it; it's rather
long. And, I don't do macros so automating a
rebuild
has to be manual for me. The second time I trashed
it,
all I was doing was update the TOC. I was trying to
get an idea how the changes were looking. I guess
you
recreate TOCs too with MDs. I used to be able to
use
MDs in old versions, but apparently not now. I'm
also
not too sure just what resaving all the docs to
current
WD format does to MD things, either.

Thanks for the comeback,

Pop

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.
Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh.
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "PopS" <[email protected]>,

First up, if you are trying to convert the mess of the files you have
into a single 'flat' file, save each one as XML, HTML or RTF (order of
preference) and use those rtf files to create a new document - you may
avoid some corruption coming through.

Second, 2002. The horses mouth is the MVPs, we all agree there are
serious stability issues with 2002 through every day experience. Let
alone the joys of the Char char etc.

I want to concentrate on the writing, not on the rules of the app I'm using.

Correct. Until that sucker starts to approach 32mb or >2k pages then
there is only social, political or geographical requirements to force
you to use a master.

Finally, I couldn't urge you more strongly to upgrade 2002 to 2003,
especially if you have reasonable-sized documents to manage.


Steve Hudson - Word Heretic

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)
Without prejudice


PopS reckoned:

"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]"

Hi PopS

I shall assume you have read everything else in this
thread, and make soe
remarks that may help: ===> Always open to that!

1) Word 97 has the "old" table engine. It will
cause less problems in old
documents, but it will not handle the nested tables
that can occur in Word
2000+ documents. It is not very robust if you need
to get into "mega"
documents.

===> Agreed. 97's only present because I used to use
it to initiate web pages before doing the final
dressups. It was quick for the mundane code and didnt'
bloat. It probably didn't even deserve mention. I
have much better tools now so it'll disappear when I
can "remember" to remove it.

2) Word 2000 is probably the professional's choice
for very long documents.
It lacks the speed and power of later versions, but
also lacks some of the
destructive bugs (sorry: "features") of the later
versions.

3) Word 2002 is a toxic soup of bugs. Don't use it
for anything
substantial.

===> Sorry to hear that since it's what I use, and have
for some time.
You sound pretty convinced but it's the first time I've
heard it; is there any "horse's mouth" I can verify the
details with? Not doubting you, just wondering what

4) Word 2003 is what I use when I need to get really
serious. Very fast,
very powerful, not quite as stable as Word 2000 but
the power makes up for
it. You have to know how to turn off the features
that cause problems.

===> lol, what's new there? Fortunately I'm not afraid
to do that and can usually figure out how.

If you have better than 512 MB of memory and Windows
XP on NTFS, you can
push Word 2003 to 5,500 pages in a single document.
If you do, you better
have a fast disk and be good at waiting. But it will
hang in there.

===> Woof! I've got the faster drives, but no 5500
pages in me!! I know what you mean though; even having
been trained to "hurry up and wait", I still am not a
good waiter!
Actually, I've been looking into the Includes:
They're new to me for some reason and I thought they'd
be more complex to use than they are, but it really
looks pretty simple once you get used to it. I might
experiment with that; I've only pulled about 80 pages
into the doc so far, so it's still in a copy/paste-able
state if I needed to recereate a few revised chapters
as separate files.

While you could follow Steve's article and use Master
Documents, I
personally wouldn't... It's a lot of work and I
would not select that
approach for your requirement. Single document and
Outline View is the way
I would go.

===> Steve's article actually looked good, but unless I
had a background approaching his, I don't think that's
the way to go either. His article was good, all due
respect to him, in that it told me how to "break" a MD,
which I did rather quickly thanks to him, and thus (he)
talked me out of using it. I want to concentrate on
the writing, not on the rules of the app I'm using.

But I would do it in Word 2003 on a grunty
workstation.

===> Well, maybe I've found a reason to upgrade; I'm
one of those who don't upgrade for the sake of
upgrading, but maybe I have a reason now. I'll have to
check with my CFO (li'l woman) and see how the
financials are. <g>

One thing I have figured out is I went from Outline
stages (note type outlines I mean) to wanting to see
final outcome too quickly. I should've practiced
delayed gratification a little longer I guess.

REgards,

PopS

Cheers

===> Inline please:

"Daiya Mitchell" <[email protected]>
wrote
in message
[I don't think any follow-ups are necessary, having
this available in two
places does not seem a problem to me]

I read your post kinda fast, so I may have missed
something.

Is there any good reason to keep your chapters in
different files? Since you
don't seem to be working with other people, why not
just combine all
chapters into one file?

===> Actually, that's what I was trying to say. A
single file and Outline View seem to give me just
what
I need, but then that bit with Word Stopped
Responding
popped its ugly head so I thought I'd check with
some
of the folks here. It happened again, so I did a
Shut
Down/Reboot and tried again; maybe that fixed it; so
far so good.


Though I have not studied Steve Hudson on using
Master Documents safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/wordhomepage.html
I get the impression that you are never supposed to
do any editing in the
master, but only in the subdocument. So you
shouldn't spend much time in
Master Document view.

===> Same impression here. I suspect one has to be
more intimate with the internals of Word to actually
use MD, or at least have a strict policy to do so.



Your apparent question: Outline View vs. Master
Documents? doesn't totally
make sense to me.

===> Sorry, I was feeling pretty muddled when I
wrote
that. Wish I could take it back and start over but
...


You didn't see anything about using Outline View to
replace Master Documents
because it's irrelevant, more or less.

===> That's what I was hoping to hear. It "seems"
irrelevant, but then MD wasn't an issue until some
folks started trying to use it in earnest.

The alternative to Master Documents is combining in
a
single file. Outline
View makes this much easier, but it is simply a
feature of Word, not exactly
...


(see here just in case you don't know the full
power
of outline view
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLView.htm

===> ?? I have read that, in fact, but didn't
notice
anything about Outline view's powers. I'll take a
look
again; I thought it was all MD info.


It also kinda sounds as though you are editing the
entirety of the work and
may need to move Subsection 3.2 from Chapter 3 to
Chapter 4, in which case I
would say you definitely don't want to be using
MDs,
as my inexperienced
impression is that that's the type of thing that
screws them up, when done
from the MD instead of via cut and paste from file
to
file. A single file,
however, can handle that fine, and Outline View
makes
it easier.

===> Yes, that's exactly what I need to do, and a
lot
of it. These are documents that were accurate "way
back then", but now need some substantial redesign.
The first time I trashed it with MD mode was
moving
chapters around rather than recreate it; it's rather
long. And, I don't do macros so automating a
rebuild
has to be manual for me. The second time I trashed
it,
all I was doing was update the TOC. I was trying to
get an idea how the changes were looking. I guess
you
recreate TOCs too with MDs. I used to be able to
use
MDs in old versions, but apparently not now. I'm
also
not too sure just what resaving all the docs to
current
WD format does to MD things, either.

Thanks for the comeback,

Pop

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.
Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh.
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Chip Orange]

Steve,

Could you elaborate on why you urge strongly to upgrade to Word 2003 for
large documents? We're still using 2002, and simply haven't upgraded
because we were under the impression it didn't have any significant new
features or bug fixes that we were interested in (and were a bit worried
that something would break somewhere! ).

Thanks.

Chip

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "Chip Orange" <[email protected]>,

2002 = unstable, new buggy features, shocking new style model etc

2003 contains auto-open magic to fix many issues we have with log
documents, especially resolving the plethora of unused list templates
that we arent allowed to delete.

Additionally, in 2003 you can force the user to use the provided
styles and no manual formatting, which for long docs is especially
useful in keeping 'corruption' and confusion levels down.

Last, Save As XML - a joyous way to keep master document corruption
down to a minimum.


Steve Hudson - Word Heretic

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)
Without prejudice


Chip Orange reckoned: