Yes. No macros should be necessary. Use a Mail Merge. This should be simpler than by user name. You can have a field in each recipient's data record that says which parts they get and test for that field. If you have three different groupings of your material, the field contents could be as simple as 1, 2, or 3.

Otherwise, if you want to be able to change it on the fly, you can use an ASK field to get what gets sent to each recipient on-the-fly.

The merged document will not contain anything except what you want.

This works for just one recipient at a time as well as for multiple recipients. You just pick your recipients when doing the merge.

I have tested mail merge and together with IF fields it works!

At first I was reluctant as I thought I would have to cut the original document into pieces, and put all optional texts in a db field. But when I added IF statements along side the mail merge I could avoid moving larger chapters away from the original.


I am not sure I would recommend this solution to anyone who isn't familiar with code, but otherwise it is pretty simple.

1. Go to tab Mailings and create a Recipient list.
2. Add IF fields that check against the recipient list and remember to add quotes around the text you want to show. (
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/mailmerge/MMergeIfFields.htm)
3. Start Mail Merge
4. Finish & Merge


The one thing to remember is to activate Show field codes (http://www.extendoffice.com/documents/word/899-word-display-hide-field-codes.html#a2), otherwise it will be hard to control the document when updating it.

A possible downside on this solution is - as you Charles pointed out earlier - that the IF fields can bloat the document if they are many.

Thank you so much for you help!