Advice for variations on a document?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stan Brown
  • Start date Start date
S

Stan Brown

Word 2003, Win XP Pro SP2

I have several variations on my resume: volunteer work shown or not,
different objectives, and so on. These affect maybe a total of 5% of
the text, in four or five places.

Right now, each variation is stored as a separate document. The
problem is that most changes affect the common parts, meaning that I
have to make them in each of the documents. I was thinking it could
be easier to set up a single document and handle the variations by
field within it.

This doesn't feel like a mail-merge application to me.

After some time with Word help, I've identified IF fields and SET
fields. If I understand correctly, I could have one SET field for the
variation name, then the other fields would reference it in IF tests
to determine which text to display. After changing the SET field, I'd
update all fields when printing.

Does that seem like a reasonable approach, or am I missing something?


P.S. What happens when I e-mail the document to someone? Is there an
easy way to replace all the field codes with the current computed
text?
 
You could insert the common bits as AutoText fields, updating the AutoText
entries as needed.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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all may benefit.
 
Wed, 1 Mar 2006 17:58:50 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill
You could insert the common bits as AutoText fields, updating the AutoText
entries as needed.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, Suzanne.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and maybe I'm just not
understanding, but that seems like it would lead to a lot of
maintenance. Using SET/IF would keep all the alternative bits right
in the document. Using AUTOTEXT fields, if I understand the help
message correctly, I'd have to retype the variable bits every time.
Is that correct?

I think I've answered this for myself -- Ctrl-Shift-F9. For some
reason I just wasn't doing the right search in the help file this
morning.
 
Perhaps I've misunderstood what you were attempting. From your later
description, it sounds like you're trying to have a single document in which
you can turn certain bits on or off. What I understood was that you had
several different documents with varying (but overlapping) content. That is,
that you had Document A, which had parts 1, 2, and 3; Document B, which had
parts 1, 2, 3, and 4; Document C, which had parts 1, 3, and 4, and so on.

Using AutoText or IncludeText fields for the content they have in common
would mean that when this content needed to be updated, you could update it
in one place (the AutoText entry or the file linked to the IncludeText
field), and it would update in all versions of the résumé. If in fact you're
trying to maintain this variability in a single file, then that's a
different issue.

--

Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:51:00 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill
Perhaps I've misunderstood what you were attempting. From your later
description, it sounds like you're trying to have a single document in which
you can turn certain bits on or off. What I understood was that you had
several different documents with varying (but overlapping) content.
Click to expand...

Right, what I have is the several documents (at last count, five)
with varying but overlapping content. The overlap is the great
majority -- maybe 90-95% of the text in the documents is identical.
For instance, the "objective" line is text A in two versions of the
resume, it's text B in two other versions, and it's text C n the
fifth. In three versions I mention citizenship and in two I don't. In
one I mention marital status and in four I don't.

That means that any change in one variation (document) is likely to
be in common text meaning that I have to open up all the other
variations and make the same change. There's obviously great
potential for error, not to mention the added effort.

What want to get to is one document that can print in any of five
variations. Essentially I want to "press a button" or in some way
just make a change in one place to select which variation.

This is why I thought SET and IF would do it for me. But I've never
used them, and before getting into it I wanted to check if it was a
reasonable approach or if I should be trying something else.

The other thing I thought of was recording some macros to do
appropriate search and replace, but that seems awfully cumbersome.
 
You might consider using AutoTextList fields for the variable content (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/AutoTextList.htm). These would give
you a choice of a variety of AutoText entries for each component. You could
then delete the unneeded components. If you create the résumé as a template,
then you can create each version, on the fly as needed, as a document based
on the template (you would need to do this if you used AutoTextList fields
because inserting the AutoText entry deletes the field).

Alternatively, you could use a UserForm to choose components to add. This of
course would require VBA (which is outside my area of expertise).

None of this is to imply that SET and IF fields would not work; I'm just not
familiar with the SET field, and consequently other methods are more likely
to occur to me.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Thu, 2 Mar 2006 10:35:02 -0600 from Suzanne S. Barnhill
You might consider using AutoTextList fields for the variable content (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/AutoTextList.htm). These would give
you a choice of a variety of AutoText entries for each
Click to expand...

Thanks Suzanne; it looks interesting.
Alternatively, you could use a UserForm to choose components to add. This of
course would require VBA (which is outside my area of expertise).

None of this is to imply that SET and IF fields would not work; I'm just not
familiar with the SET field, and consequently other methods are more likely
to occur to me.
Click to expand...

Understood. I'll read the Autotextlist document more carefully and
make a decision.
 
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