PHP/ASP Style Includes

[Guest]

I work at a medium sized law firm, and one of my duties is to manage our Word
Templates. Most of our pleadings use the same Certificate of Service ("POS")
(a list of the names and addresses of the parties being served). What that
means is, whenever we amend or change the POS, I have to go into each Word
Template to make the change. Of course I copy and paste, but even that takes
long, considering how many pleadings we have.

What I was wondering, was if Microsoft has released, or plans on releasing
programming type includes for Word, so I could just reference a single
external POS in all of the pleadings.

Or, if includes aren't a possibilty, is there some sort of batch edit option?

 

[Graham Mayor]

You could perhaps bookmark the names in the external document then use
IncludeText fields to insert the bookmarked texts in neew documents created
from your document templates. Provided the data document name, path and
bookmark names remain constant you can use the same format each time in your
templates. When you create a new document from a template the names of the
parties would be called from the data.
You would of course then have to fix the includetext fields in the documents
you produce as each time you update the fields the information from the
revised data source will be added. The following macro should do that.

Sub FixFields()
Dim oStory As Range
For Each oStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
With oStory.Fields
.Update
.Unlink
End With
If oStory.StoryType <> wdMainTextStory Then
While Not (oStory.NextStoryRange Is Nothing)
Set oStory = oStory.NextStoryRange
With oStory.Fields
.Update
.Unlink
End With
Wend
End If
Next oStory
Set oStory = Nothing
End Sub

This should make it relatively easy to produce new sets of documents, though
existing documents may require some work, however as these are legal
documents why would there be any need to change them later?

Charles Kenyon - a lawyer - is also a Wordie and has a site that you may
find useful http://addbalance.com/word/#PageStart

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

THanks for the help.

I should have mentioned this before, but we use TimeMatters ("TM") (and its
tempate system) in conjunction with Microsoft Word. The value of fields in TM
get passed from TM, to a temporary .txt file, and then into TM specific merge
fields in MS Word.

Among those values are the names, street number, city, state, zip of
opposing counsel and other parties of interest in that particular case.

So considering TM has its own merge fields, would your solution still work?