Hi Cathal,

There are techniques that can be employed for creating documents whose content will update automatically when content in another file changes, but that's generally considered inadvisable for anything for which recourse to copies of the original documents is required for legal/tax purposes and the like. Essentially, these techniques work typically through the use of INCLUDETEXT and/or INCLUDEPICTURE fields. In those organisations using them, the templates concerned typically incorporate a macro to unlink the documents from the source material, specifically to prevent the kind of updating I mentioned.

Of course, where corporate manuals, etc. need to reflect current logos etc, the use of INCLUDETEXT and/or INCLUDEPICTURE fields is quite appropriate. Whilst in an ideal world these would be added to the documents when they're created, it can be done later.

The other approach is to forego the use of INCLUDETEXT and/or INCLUDEPICTURE fields and simply update the documents as required - which is the situation you're now in. This updating can be done programmatically, but you'd need to be selective about it, to ensure only the correct documents are updated and only the applicable portions of those documents are modified. For example, you wouldn't want to replace an entire header if it has content (eg serial Nos, dates) that needs to be retained.

Before anyone could provide specific advice on modifying your documents, we'd need to know more about the current header/footer content, how it is to be changed and how to locate any logos, etc that might be required.

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