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My response is the same as the general consensus: "don't do it!" It
seems to create extra work in a living document. I experienced the
heartbreak once at another (high-tech, computer programming) company
which never used it again. My current employer also avoids the master
document, for all the reasons included on the Word MVP site that Geoff
provided the link for (see below for MVP article text). I live and
breathe Word, but I've seen a lot of file corruption, particularly in
documents that are worked on by many people who don't always know how to
use Word properly and who cut and paste like crazy from many other
documents and formats.
To deal with large documents, the easiest and quickest method has been
splitting large files into sections, usually the main text, then
appendices. But where the main text has been more than 1000 pages, and
whenever graphics are involved, splitting by chapters has worked fine.
Leaving graphics until the very end and right before production (hard or
electronic copy), of course, is the preferred method.
Jeanne K. Tsutsui Keuma
WHY MASTER DOCUMENTS CORRUPT
Article contributed by John McGhie
The complete explanation would be a book in itself. For now, it is
enough to know that a Word document is a great big "list" of objects. An
object can be anything you can put in a Word document. Each of these
objects has many, many "properties" that determine how it appears and
how it behaves.
The properties are all contained in several giant "tables" inside the
file. The connection between any given object (say, a paragraph) and its
properties is made with an amazingly complex lattice-work of "pointers".
These pointers are large binary numbers that cause Word to look at an
exact byte location in the file to see what shape, size, or colour this
object should be. Most objects have more than one pointer. Some pointers
go to "collections" of properties (for example, a "List Template" that
describes all the formatting for a numbered list) and some go simply to
a single entry (for example the "language" that is just a single name).
Whenever we experience a "Word document corruption", what has actually
happened is that the pointer, or the entry in the table it points to,
has become corrupted. The information found there is either nonsense, or
it does not apply to the object in question. For example, a paragraph is
trying to inherit page margins: a paragraph cannot have page margins, so
Word gets terribly confused.
All these property tables are stored in Section Breaks. A Section Break
is not just a "page break", it is a binary container that stores several
hundred properties in multiple tables. The largest Section Break is the
"Default" Section Break. You will never see one. The default Section
Break hides in the very last paragraph mark of a document. Because it is
absolutely essential to the document (without it, the file is just a
stream of bytes, not a document) Word maintains the contents itself and
hides it from you and me.
The reason that Master Documents cause so much trouble is that you are
asking Word to merge together many hundreds of different settings, some
of which conflict, some of which apply only to one or a few paragraphs.
A typical master document may contain 20 sub-documents. This means there
are 21 "default" Section Breaks, each containing potentially-conflicting
properties. Each subdocument also can contain multiple "user" Section
Breaks. These may or may not override or conflict with the settings in
one or more of the default Section Breaks.
If a property is specified, does it apply to this document? Some of this
document? Several of these documents? And is the document that stores it
open? Is it "active"? Read-only or editable? The number of possibilities
rapidly expands, geometrically, until the structure simply becomes too
complex. Word loses track of what it is trying to do. And takes a guess.
The guess overwrites something: and Bingo! You lose your master
document.
When we say you "lose" your master document, this "loss" can take many
forms. You wouldn't be reading this at all if you had not so far
experienced one of the lesser forms. You can still read "some" of your
text, right? Trust me, it can get worse! The ultimate master document
corruption results in some or all of the text paragraphs disappearing.
Once this happens, there is no way to get them back: they are no longer
in the file. Which can be very disconcerting if the corruption happened
several weeks ago, and because you were not looking at that part of the
document, you didn't find out about it until you came to print the whole
thing, by which time you had long since over-written your backup!
A master document has only two possible states: Corrupt, or just about
to be corrupt. And that is why we say that the only possible fix to a
master document is "don't use it!"
For information on how to recover a Master Document, please see the
article How to recover Master Documents.
AND FROM THE OVERVIEW IN "HOW TO RECOVER MASTER DOCUMENTS"
Notice how this article starts off with the cheerful assumption that you
want to "recover" a Master Document? I bet you were hoping that we would
tell you how to "fix" one! We can't. If you are having a problem with a
master document, the problem is the master document. Any attempt you
make to repair one will inevitably make your problem worse.
Do not be tempted to re-create a master document. If you re-create the
master document, you will immediately re-create the problem. Master
documents have been fatally buggy since Word 6, and remain so through
Word 2000. If you use them you lose them. They must never be used for
valuable text.
There is no way to successfully and safely use master documents. They
always corrupt eventually.
To understand why, you need to understand the Microsoft Word document
internal structure in some detail.
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