Hi all,



I have a really quick question, relating to using word to create business proposals...

Is there a way to create 'parts' of a document that can be easily added and removed from a document? For example, lets say that I am creating a proposal for building a website and I have different parts to add that would be relevant to individual proposal, but follow similar formats. Ideally I could create 'parts' that would contain headers and paragraphs of content, such as design, development, e-commerce, wordpress, etc.

Then to create a new proposal I would open my proposal template then select which 'parts' I want in the proposal and volia, a proposal is quickly constructed.

If this is not possible, is there any software that can do this to make the process easier and quicker?

Thanks

Hi

Don't know how to do that in Word as I use word as a formatter/TOC creator rather than a true WP. But I do what you seem to want to do in software called Scrivener which is a document project manager. Primarily for book writing/manuscript creation/ V large report writing. IF you like - it is a very advanced Word Navigator function.

I use this software for report writing and writing textbooks. For instance if I use a section repeatedly but need to "fill in the blanks" I just drag over the relevent folder/page from the template. The software is NOT a WP but has most of the functionality of a WP (Fonts, paragraphing formatting) but will not do things like indexing/TOC/Captions etc. But you can just export it to Word once you're done for formatting.

Think of it as though you were writing a textbook and Scrivener will organise the book for you and Word will format it. It costs but is cheap around $40

Thanks for the reply ngmp, I will check it out.

In general, you can use AutoText to store large or small portions of text and graphics. See Automated Boilerplate Using Microsoft Word
You can even use the AutoTextList field to make a menu of parts to insert.

Look into using the StyleRef field in your headers/footers. When you link the StyleRef field to a header style used in your "parts" the header/footer changes automatically to reflect the page contents. Then your parts can be stored as AutoText. See also Why use Microsoft Word’s built-in heading styles?

If that won't work for you, for parts with headers/footers it gets much more complex. This is because to change headers/footers you need to insert a section. Each section has potentially three different headers/footers and may or may not continue some of them from a previous section. See Sections / Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word 2007-2010

I have not tried storing a section break set the way I want in an AutoText part. If you try it, please write back and let us know whether it works.

Otherwise, you could have these parts as separate documents and use a macro to 1) Insert a next-page section break, 2) discontinue the same as previous setting for headers/footers, and 3) insert that document in your new section complete with headers/footers.

You can also create Quick Parts and Building Blocks for adding standard content.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]