Cross-posted at: https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...o-another.html


Please don't post the same question in multiple forums.

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

Macropod,

Regarding cross-posting...my question deals with both Word and Excel... so which should I post it to? If you look at the post by Bob Bridges, it will give you some insight on what I mean. Plus, what's the harm? Maybe someone with Word experience will have a better idea as to the solution than someone with Excel experience? I just don't get it, don't you want these threads to have activity? I'm not spamming or anything, it's a legitimate request.

I was going to ask the same thing, macropod. I've heard people objecting to cross-posting (and others insist that when something is cross-posted it's polite to announce the fact), but I've never understood the objection. What's the basis for this very common belief? Maybe I'm missing some practical reason for it. In fact, I think I must be.

Thank you, BobBridges, I'm in the same boat. I'm not on these forums too much but was awfully confused by macropod's reply when I read it. So you are limited to one forum for any post? Did I offend someone by posting my question that has to do with both excel and word in both forums? It seems as though we're both missing something here. I'm not interested in receiving only half of the solution so if that's the case I'm not sure this forum will be very helpful to me at all.

Never mind, macropod. Pecoflyer posted this link in another thread that explains it very well.

Jmaxcy, the point seems to be not that you must never cross-post, but that when you do you're asking more than one group of people to work on the same problem. Since all of us who answer questions are volunteering our time because we want to help, the result is that you take up the time of more people than may be necessary. So the writer of the above page says:

1) Post your question at one place first, and give them a few days to respond. If you don't get any reply then go ahead and ask elsewhere, but:
2) Always announce when you cross-post, so people know what they're getting into, and explain why.
3) When you get an answer, mark your question "solved" wherever you asked it (not just in the forum where you got the answer), so that others won't waste time on it.

This makes sense to me. In your case, you were asking for help from a different set of experts about a different aspect of the problem, so you might not think it was actually cross-posting but only looked like it. But given how experienced forumites feel about cross-posting, it's probably better, and certainly more polite, to write the question differently. In the Excel forum you were asking how to set up the problem; from the Word forum what you really want is more information on how to identify and copy the parts of the text that need to be transferred from the Q doc to the C doc.

In this case, it would have been appropriate to post in any one of the Word, Excel or Office forums. I'd suggest the latter due to the cross-application issues.

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

I've glanced at the posts in the Office forum, macropod; they talk about different kinds of issues there (and far fewer ones, as well). I think in the end he picked the right one; he can ask specific questions in the Word forum, but here in Excel is where he's probably going to do the bulk of the work.