Hi, DavidE,

It seems this type of idea gets grappled with every so often here. You might want to look at this thread from a few months ago (I remember it more because I was one of the contributors). https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...-can-make.html There are others as well.

There are a lot of things you can try. Quick Parts and Fields tend to work for shorter, repeated parts. It does sound like keeping individual sections as separate documents, and then using macros/VBA to shorten the work of inserting all the various segments into one document may be of interest.

I also work with engineering documents, and the way they typically build the reports is rather old fashioned and tedious for now. We have several report templates and they either edit themselves or mark up from there and have us do the editing. Or, more often than not, the senior engineer picks a report from a similar project and uses that as a go-by. One thing - in general, it seems way easier and quicker to remove bigger pieces from a larger master template than to add to it. If you have whole sections to remove, the easiest way to do that is by having Navigation View on to the left of your document. You can right mouse click on Section 8, select "Select Heading and Content", and then delete it. If your sections are auto-numbered, section 9 becomes new section 8 and so on.

Best,

Ann