Re: Single-sourcing, sort of
[snip]
Copying the numbered items from the master RFP document to the individual RFP response is rather a pain. Not a big one, but it's ongoing.
Can you think of any way to type the number in the response document and have it expand to the answer the number corresponds to? The obvious solution would be autotext, but that's static, and the numbers change as new answers get interpolated in.
Beth,
I'm not sure your workflow is the most efficient way to attack the RFP process, but if all you want to do is solve the copy/paste problem, I think you should be able to do it with a macro. Try setting it up like this:
1. Give the item numbers in your master document a unique character style (ItemNumber, perhaps).
2. If your responses are all just straight paragraph text, assign a unique style to them (WFresponse, perhaps). If they are more complicated (including bulleted lists, figures, whatever), this won't work. Instead, put a hidden something-or-other at the start of each response (hidden text, or an anchor or marker of some sort that you can search for) and a different one at the end of each response.
3. Give your master document a fixed name and file location. That is, don't rename it every time you revise it.
4. In the response template (where you are building the individual response documents), set up a style for the dummy numbers that you or your SMEs are going to use (ResponseToken).
5. Set up a macro in your response template that does this:
a. Find next ResponseToken.
b. Look for matching ItemNumber in the master document.
c. Scan forward in master document to find the beginning and end markers of the corresponding response.
d. Copy that response.
e. Come back to the response document and paste it in place of the token.
Think that would work?
Dick
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Single-sourcing, sort of: From: Beth Friedman
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