I am writing a technical manual for some equipment which has various configurations depending on the particular setup that the end customer has.

So for example, if the equipment was a computer system, all customers would have the case, the hard drive, the fan unit and power supply, but customer 1 might have a CD writer, and customer 2 might have a DVD burner, customer 3 might have both as well as extra RAM etc etc.



And there are various other configurations for different customers.

What I'm trying to avoid is duplicated content across the different customer manuals. So ideally what I need to do is break down the manual into the respective component parts (PSU, hard drive, CD writer etc) and then for each customer manual build, just pull in the component data for that customer depending on their configuration.

This way I only ever have the data for each component written once rather duplicated multiple times. Making management of that data much easier.

Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to achieve this kind of thing with Word (other than Master Docs which is a swearword in these forums I understand )?

Personally, I might use Mail Merge with the data in an Excel spreadsheet.

However there is a multitude of methods for repeating data. Most are reviewed here:
Repeating Data (Populating Multiple Like Fields)