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Old 05-27-2022, 10:32 AM
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DavidE DavidE is offline Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents Windows 10 Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents Office 2016
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Default Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents

I don't know if this has been asked, but I cannot find a post that describes exactly what I am looking for.



My office routinely prepares several different types of documents - Engineering reports, engineering proposals, and legal declarations, to name three types. All of them have certain language that is unique unto the type of document, but each type of document addresses subjects that we have written about over and over again for many different clients. What we are trying to do is become more standardized and allow the people who write these documents to start with the sections or paragraphs they need rather than have to re-write the same thing over again or look through hundreds of old files to find the document that has what we have previously written about a subject. Every report and declaration is unique, but they all include certain things that are very similar and sometimes identical to another document previously submitted to a different client.

I considered using Word's Quick Parts, but quick parts is not really intended to drop entire sections of documents, which could be several pages long, into a current document. It seems that it would also make for a very large normal.dotm file if we tried to use Quick Parts for every type of document and cover all of the subjects we address.

We could store the standardized language for each subject in a different word file in a common network location, but then the problem is still how to find the exact file we need and quickly import it.

Is there perhaps a third-party tool that can organize and allow someone to easily import often repeated entire sections of documents? If Quick Parts or using very long and descriptive file names are the best answers, then so be it. But if anyone has any suggestions for making this easy, whether using native Word features or some third-party tool, I would appreciate hearing them. Thank you.
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Old 05-27-2022, 11:15 AM
kilroyscarnival kilroyscarnival is offline Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents Windows 10 Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents Office 2019
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Hi, DavidE,

It seems this type of idea gets grappled with every so often here. You might want to look at this thread from a few months ago (I remember it more because I was one of the contributors). https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...-can-make.html There are others as well.

There are a lot of things you can try. Quick Parts and Fields tend to work for shorter, repeated parts. It does sound like keeping individual sections as separate documents, and then using macros/VBA to shorten the work of inserting all the various segments into one document may be of interest.

I also work with engineering documents, and the way they typically build the reports is rather old fashioned and tedious for now. We have several report templates and they either edit themselves or mark up from there and have us do the editing. Or, more often than not, the senior engineer picks a report from a similar project and uses that as a go-by. One thing - in general, it seems way easier and quicker to remove bigger pieces from a larger master template than to add to it. If you have whole sections to remove, the easiest way to do that is by having Navigation View on to the left of your document. You can right mouse click on Section 8, select "Select Heading and Content", and then delete it. If your sections are auto-numbered, section 9 becomes new section 8 and so on.

Best,

Ann
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Old 05-28-2022, 11:01 AM
Charles Kenyon Charles Kenyon is offline Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents Windows 10 Alternatives to Word's Quick Parts for Organizing Often Repeated Sections of Documents Office 2019
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First, "Quick Parts" is a confusing term because MS really messed up when naming it. Quick Parts on the Insert Tab has several distinct parts that bear little relationship to one another:
  • Quick Parts building Blocks - If you add something to Quick Parts Gallery it is a "building block." It shows up on the Quick Parts Gallery in that menu. It is only one of 35 building blocks galleries. Building Blocks & AutoText by Greg Maxey You can use all of the galleries.
  • AutoText - This is another building blocks gallery and the original one. It is the only one that can be used in the Mac versions of Word.
  • Document Property (Content Controls) - again a mishmash of a term. See my page Repeating Data Using Document Property Content Controls and Other Mapped Content Controls and Enhanced Document Properties AddIn by Greg Maxey.
  • Fields - These date back to Word 97, at least, and have not changed much. Paul Edstein has a number of pinned tutorials here on fields.
  • The Building Blocks Organizer - intended to give more control over all building blocks to the user. Greg Maxey has a Building Blocks Add-In at the bottom of his page that is an enhanced version of this.
With that stated, Building Blocks are stored in Templates. Where can Building Blocks be stored?

Building blocks can be as little as a word or a symbol and can be multiple pages and sections. As far as I know, they can contain anything that a Word document can contain. Look at Build & Deploy Custom Building Block Galleries by Greg Maxey. Those can be in individual document templates or in Global Templates available in all documents. A simple example of using a custom gallery and including a drop-down for it in the QAT can be found in my 2003 WordArt Add-In for 2010-2019 (365).

A very powerful tool to use with building blocks is the Building Blocks Gallery Content Control. Another is the AutoTextList field. (Even though it says "AutoText" it works with any building block.) AutoText Menus in your document - Incorporating AutoText or other Building Blocks in Templates


I think building blocks can do everything you want. I would not be using the Quick Parts building blocks gallery for them, though. I would certainly examine this feature more closely before trying to create something else.
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