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Win Day wrote:
"An even easier way to do this in Word would be to have 4 versions of the
template,
each one with a different Body text style as not hidden. Then by switching
templates, making sure the styles update as I go,
I can change which text prints and which is hidden."
I have a better suggestion than having four versions to keep current.
I spent two years at Coca-Cola Headquarters (Corporate Legal division)
writing automated contracts and other documents.
Most of it involved using a dialog box to gathering the user's choices,
then using those choices to manipulat the document, i.e.,
which paragraphs to add, cut, display, and hide. Some contracts were
80-pages long with up to sixty individual pieces to manipulate.
Jobs that formerly took up to three days of manual changes, word processing
cycles, and proofing, could now be done in less than
20 minutes. The key to those documents was good up front planning to be
sure the right selection would always put the correct text
in the right place. Attorneys could speak to someone on the phone, answer
the questions on line, push a button to run the macro,
push another to print the contract, and have a draft on the fax in minutes.
Compared to those, my suggestion to control various paragraph styles is a
snap (as long as you aren't working in Office '97
which uses VBA under Word). I'm currently putting together a WordBASIC
macro for printing options of a training document that has
six variations depending on which of combination of our seven products the
client purchased. It involves creating a small macro
with a dialog box that displays different options. You make a couple of
selections (radio buttons or check boxes) to define the
version you want to print and the macro hides specific paragraph styles
based on your selections, then prints the document.
If you're interested in doing it this way, contact me off line and give me
some details. I can help you work up a macro that
you can attach to the document either as a button to display on the tool
bar or as an item on a menu. Something like this can
usually be done in about 2-3 hours, including testing and tweeking.
Kathy Frost
KFrost -at- BTSquared -dot- com
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