Is there an easy way to maintain two very similar documents in 2013?

[kballinas]

I have a user guide that I need two versions of; the only differences will be a few images and a few small sections need to be swapped out.



I would really like to have the majority of the content in one file, so that if in the future I need to change a large portion of the file I don't have to track down what needs to be changed twice (or more since I might add more versions later on).

Is there an easy solution to maintain multiple versions of the same file?

Currently, I moved two large sections (where all of these differences will be) from the main file to two other version specific files, and then whenever I need to change something I will updated in the main file, copy over the sections from one version file, save it as a new finished file and do the same for the other version.

Thanks for any help in advance.

[Charles Kenyon]

There are several ways. I beleve all of them involve bookmarking text.

You can have one document that is the repository.
Then, in a new (display/print) document you can use IncludeText fields to pull text from the repository document into the new one. You will want to update those fields when you open the display document.

Download my IncludeText tutorial for ideas.

[kballinas]

Awesome! Thanks, this will work better than manually opening the documents and copying over what I need. Is there a way to update all IncludeText fields to use the same document? Just to prevent me not updating a field somewhere (since this will be a very long document).

[Charles Kenyon]

Yes. Unless you have other things you do not want updated, simply Ctrl+A followed by F9 will update all fields.

Graham Mayor posted a macro here that can be used as well. That can be made particular to only IncludeText fields but that takes a bit more.

[kballinas]

Thanks, this works marvelously. Using a combination of alt+f9, update all the file name strings, and ctrl+a > f9 I can easily switch between each version.

One last question though, do you have any tips using relative paths to the files? When I first tried this method, I went with relative paths and it was working fine, but as I played around with it (i.e. adding more fields, using bookmarks ect.) it stopped working with relative paths. Now, unless I use the full path, I get a "Error! Not a valid filename" message. I am not sure what changed.

Have you experienced any difficulty with relative paths? And, are there any tips you can share?

EDIT:
I did a bit of research, and apparently, in word, includedtext uses the active directory when using relative paths, so relatives paths sometimes work sometimes don't.

I got around this issue using the filename field like so {includetext "{filename \p}/../mySource.docx" someBookmark}.
I found this to be the best solution from what I read.

[Charles Kenyon]

Word Fields and Relative Paths to External Files

[eNGiNe]

Just an untested thought … as long the variable text doesn't involve any fancy formatting, I could imagine using styles for variantA, variantB and so on and setting the unwanted styles to "hidden text" before printing. (pretty well what I do with conditional text in my usual environment)