Basic masterdocuments and subdocuments troubles

[Guest]

Help please someone. I am a bit lost.
I am a chef trying to put together two books. One for recipes and one for
menus. It may sound strange, but its the best way for me to become organized.
What I did was create a table of contents (appetizers, meat, fish, desserts,
etc.) then cross-refrenced them so that they would be easier to reach with
all of the pages. Then I found the master document function and followed the
instructions with each of the contents as sub documents.
After I put the table of contents in the outline I saved each as Master Menu
and Master Recipe. Then I went back into each and I only had the table of
contents with no sub documents. I tried to expand, collapes and even tried
to reinsert sub documents with separate sheets.
I may have confused my situation, but I am at a loss here.
The program is exactly what I need for the project. I just need a bit of
guidence. If anyone can put some parameters around this I would be forever
greatful.
I will even throw in a few recipes, if interested.
Thank you very much.
Tony Larsen

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Don't use Master Documents for this - it's buggy and way too complicated for
what you need here. If you want to maintain two separate documents but have
them combined into one, use the Insert > File function and choose Insert as
link.

I'm not clear on exactly how you want to organise this and how the
navigation is supposed to work - are you using Word's Table of Contents, or
is this something you are typing? Have you used heading styles for your
recipe headings and groups? If you do, you'll find it much easier to cross
reference and produce an automatic table of contents, and also to use the
Outline view to navigate and manage the recipes. You might also want to look
at Indexing.

I suggest you have a look at Shauna Kelly's site at
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/index.html and at the MVP FAQs at
http://www.word.mvps.org. If you are still stuck post back with more
details of the structure you are trying to achieve.