need recommendation or ideas

[Julie]

hi

I've got a client who use word for book creation i.e. User books which
demand TOC, indexes, chapter creation leading to putting the whole book
together. Master/Sub documents do not work for them in consolidating all
elements of the book. They've had someone create a few macros for them to
automate parts of the work but will soon not have access to that person.

A company I used to work for had developed a custom version of word that
automated everything. Unfortunately it is supported only up to word 97
version - it would have been perfect for them.

Can anyone recommend an off-the-shelf custom version of word that would
automate long document creation without the user having to create all of the
code?

thanks for your help

 

[Jezebel]

Hard to make suggestions without some clue as to what it is you want to
automate. Word already does chapters, TOC, and indexes.

 

[Julie]

Thanks for responding.

Yes, word does all that but it's a very manual effort even using styles.
What the program I used did was provide a menu which listed items one could
create i.e. TOC, Chapter, Title page, etc. Once you got all the chapters
done you ran a macro that put all chapters in order, automatically went
through the document and created the TOC in a pre-exiting template (there
were additional templates added to the main word template (normal.dot), all
with the correct headers and footers that named each chapter, made sure to
start on odd page, etc.

After performing that step you ran a program to automatically create a
concordance file for an index based on styles - it was a program that went
through the entire document. Then you'd run the last macro to put everything
together. It was truly a thing of beauty and I miss it.

I know this custom word solution contained components such as auto text
entries (pre-populated), additional templates on top of the normal.dot, and
many, many macros. It initially took the company 16 months to develop the
in-house product.

Does that give you a better idea?