I have a Document that is several hundred pages long with a MS Word TOC that has all my sections linked. The Document details separate operating procedures. Is it possible to create a new smaller document that can pull specified sections from the original document to create the new smaller and more concentrated document?

For example:


I have written everything there is to know about football including all information on every team. I then want to produce a document for a fan who is an avid lover of of Team X and desires clarification on the difference between off sides, encroachments, and false starts. I also have another fan of Team Y that really wants to know tailgating traditions around that teams stadium, average ticket prices, the stats for each Offensive Line player and the fouls committed by the O-Line from last week.

Let's say I already have all that information in the main document and it can all be found by clicking on the appropriate heading in the TOC. Is there a way to enter in those conditions to create a separate, smaller document containing that information and print each desired document to each fan and none of the other stuff? All I can think of is copy and paste which could take a while. Not sure if this can be done in Word or Access or something. Thank you for all of your help.

Can it be done? I'm sure it can, although I would take a long time to be able to do it. It would probably be easier in Access, but Access does not have the document finishing capabilities of Word. This would be a major project for me, taking days, if not months, of uninterrupted time. Is it worth it to you to spend that kind of time?

If so, someone here will probably be able to give you pointers. If done in Word, you will need a highly structured document, probably with all or most of the formatting done in styles. Or, at least all formatting of the headings for the parts you will want to pull out.

By the way, "master document" is jargon for a Word feature you do not want to be using. Master Documents "Feature"

You may also want to look into AutoText and other Building Blocks. Automated Boilerplate Using Microsoft Word

What you are describing is known single-sourcing using conditional text. The regular technical writing software packages do exactly this (such as Madcap Flare) but Word is not known for this ability.

However, it can certainly be done in Word and wouldn't necessarily take as long as Charles predicted. It does require some highish level skills in Word programming though.

The basic steps are:

1. You need to tag every 'chunk' of the document with bookmarks.
2. Then you build a userform that presents a listbox of all the bookmarks which can be selected
3. The macro then hides all of the non-selected chunks and shows all of the selected chunks
4. Update the TOC and output to PDF

The trick would be structuring your document and organising your bookmarks so that any chunks can be shown or hidden without leaving holes in the heading structure. It is possible to overlap different bookmarks so IF you do this, the macro that shows/hides the content will need to do the hiding first and then the showing second.

FWIW, I wouldn't be looking at doing this in MS Access unless you were looking to make this far more complicated.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks for your help. Good to get more than one angle of approach. I still have a fair bit of work to add to the existing document. Then I'll be ready to try these out.

Create a Simple Userform
Create & Employ a Userform