HELP: Trying to Automate Documention Content

[premington]

Greetings--new user; first post!

I have a rather sophisticated feature I'm trying to do in Word, but don't
know how to accomplish. I'm a technical writer and produce the user manuals
for our company. One product has sixteen different variations of the same
manual, 95% of which is the same with subtle differences peppered throughout
the document.

I have a new manager who has asked me to automate the structure of the
document so we have one manual that can be constructed as any one of the
sixteen variants on the fly. I don't know how to do this in Word. The idea
is to manage updates only on one document rather than the way we’re managing
updates now. Currently, one update has to be replicated sixteen times. This
has a huge impact on our development time for documentation updates.

My manager suggested Mail Merge, which looks useless for our use. The
problem is, the changes could affect the header, footer, in some cases
graphics, text within the body of the document, and this all could affect
pagination.

Does Word offer an advanced feature to manage content so one manual can
actually be sixteen different manuals and a user can automate the way in
which a manual content is constructed?

I appreciate the help!

-Paul

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Mail merge would certainly be one way of doing it.

To see how to handle the graphics, see the "Graphics from data base" item
under the "Special merges" section of fellow MVP Cindy Meister's website at:

http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MergFram.htm

Large blocks of text could be inserted from files in a similar way using
IncludeText fields in place of IncludePicture fields.

Minor phrase/word changes could be handled by having them directly in the
data source.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[Paul Remington]

Hmmm... Well, I still don't see how Mail Merge can help in a way that saves
time. The grunt work to *maybe* make it work appears to be more work than
just revising the documentation manually. I think I follow what Cindy's page
references, but it doesn't address how to manage (in our case) 16 different
manual trypes within the user manual and how a writer would select content
for one manual type over another.

It appears we would have to have some form of template file that would house
all the various changes for all 16 manuals with graphics being pointed to a
backend database, and then fields in the primary file pointing to content in
the template file, which points to the graphic fields in the database file.
OMG! This is a snaky nightmare! I'm clueless how to select content for one
manual flavor over the 15 other varietals. None of this addresses how to
deal with automated figure references and cross references, changes to index
entries, and pagination.

I'm very skeptical whether Word can actually do this. Based on the lack of
responses I'm getting in this and other forums, I'm quickly realizing Word
isn't designed for this level of sophistication in terms of document
automation.

If anyone feels I'm wrong, please chime in! I'm really eager to find a
solution and striking out on all tries.

-Paul