Links between word documents

[Guest]

I work for an insurance company and we have many many standard letters and forms. I have 8 forms in word now but expect to have about 30 letters/forms eventually.

We send out standard letters to our customers all the time and each time the clerk types in the required basic information and then adds some one time information.

What I'd like to do is have one master document where we can put the basic info for each customer and have that information automatically entered into the other 30 documents. We would then have one master and 30 sub documents for each of our customers. Each sub document could be changed as needed while still leaving the basic information there (name, address, telephone number etc etc

If it were excel it would be easy, I would just have 1 document with 30 worksheets. I don't know how best to set this up with word (1 folder for each customer?) nor do I know how to get the links to work

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Ned.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Mail-merge works well for this. The customer information is put into a data
file in either a Word table or an Excel worksheet. See the links at
http://www.addbalance.com/word/wordwebresources.htm#mailmerge, especially
the ones by Cindy Meister.


FYI, "Master Document" is a term of art in Word referring to a "feature"
that not only doesn't work but also destroys documents. See
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm for more
information.
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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from my ignorance and your wisdom.

I work for an insurance company and we have many many standard letters and

forms. I have 8 forms in word now but expect to have about 30 letters/forms
eventually.

We send out standard letters to our customers all the time and each time

the clerk types in the required basic information and then adds some one
time information.

What I'd like to do is have one master document where we can put the basic

info for each customer and have that information automatically entered into
the other 30 documents. We would then have one master and 30 sub documents
for each of our customers. Each sub document could be changed as needed
while still leaving the basic information there (name, address, telephone
number etc etc)

If it were excel it would be easy, I would just have 1 document with 30

worksheets. I don't know how best to set this up with word (1 folder for
each customer?) nor do I know how to get the links to work.

 

[Guest]

Ned, try it this way..
Investigate the mail merge utility and set up your 30 or so letters with the appropriate mail merge fields inserted.

Then set up your "master" document to include a series of SET fields at the beginning to set the values for the various mail merge fields followed by a series of {includetext} fields - one for each document in the set

Alternatively, as long as you're planning on one "master" document for each customer, you could set the sub documents up to use document variables, then, instead of using SET fields, you could just type the variable info into the document properties dialog box and the document itself would only include {includetext} fields and page breaks

HTH
-Susan W. Gallaghe

----- Ned Ludd wrote: ----

I work for an insurance company and we have many many standard letters and forms. I have 8 forms in word now but expect to have about 30 letters/forms eventually.

We send out standard letters to our customers all the time and each time the clerk types in the required basic information and then adds some one time information.

What I'd like to do is have one master document where we can put the basic info for each customer and have that information automatically entered into the other 30 documents. We would then have one master and 30 sub documents for each of our customers. Each sub document could be changed as needed while still leaving the basic information there (name, address, telephone number etc etc

If it were excel it would be easy, I would just have 1 document with 30 worksheets. I don't know how best to set this up with word (1 folder for each customer?) nor do I know how to get the links to work

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks


Ned.

 

[Guest]

You guys are awesome. I have not tried your ideas yet but will set this up over the next week or so

What a selfless act - to help out a stranger with no chance of any reward (except my thanks)

So on to your "reward" -

Thank you very very much

Ned.