Show/hide large pieces of a document?

[Jason Weiss]

Hi,

Here's an interesting challenge... I was asked to create an application
that would let users choose paragraphs to show or hide using a checkbox.
The basic idea is that they would look at several alternate paragraphs per
page, choose one by checking its checkbox, and then generate the "final"
version of the document, which would hide the non-checked paragraphs on each
page. In some cases, entire pages could be shown or hidden with page-level
checkboxes in addition to the paragraph-level checkboxes (e.g., if a page is
checked, only show the paragraphs on that page that are also checked).

I don't know where to start on this one. I've fiddled around with bookmarks
and ranges, and neither seems to offer an easy answer. Can anyone offer any
good suggestions to make this a straightforward kind of project?

Thanks to anyone who can help...

....Jay

 

[Jezebel]

The short answer is: Word is not a good choice for what you're trying to do.
You can do all the bits of the task (selecting paragraphs, showing and
hiding, etc); but the mechanism ultimately relies on the structure of the
document, and as soon as you let people edit the document, you can't rely on
the structure remaining stable.

The best you can do is define bookmarks for the selectable paragraphs or
sections; then set the unselected matter to Hidden, either directly through
the Font object, or by applying a style.

There's no way show/hide pages in Word. Pages are not part of the document
structure as such (and don't figure in the object model) -- they are an
output of the document rendering, according to visible content, printer,
etc.

Another approach is to store your pages and paragraphs separately in a
database, then use Word to construct your output using only the selected
material. There are commercial applications around already that do precisely
that.