Back in the days when WordPerfect was (arguably) the world's leading word processor, it did not do master documents very well either. Although (arguably) it did it better than Word has ever done. The problem I think lies inherent in the concept of multiple files and the I\O involved. I\O has been, and remains, the leading cause of corruption.



IMO Word itself is robust enough to handle most situations that one can think of that in theory master documents are supposed to handle.

Since Fumei has mentioned Another Product by name, I'll out myself as a long-term user of FrameMaker, and interested observer – to field questions from colleagues who write up their own information to send me as input – of Word. FM 'books' just … work.

While we're at it, I've not managed really encouraging results with Open/Libre Office master documents either :-}

I agree. Since Word 2003, at least, very few documents need to be split into multiple files, at least on a modern computer with multiple Gb of RAM. For those that do need this, RD fields seem to be part of the answer.

The inclusion of this "feature" was the marketing people trying to match Word Perfect, probably over the objections/reservations of the technical people. I wish they could be held accountable for the grief they have caused many people, primarily graduate students.