Force Byte
Using Master Document in Word

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Recently, I received an e-mail from a colleague in CCB. He suggested that I talk about the Master Document feature of Word because recently he had to open a large number of attachments in an e-mail individually. This, he said, was extremely cumbersome and not user-friendly, and wondered whether I could help to enable him to produce a master document with minimal effort.

Without doubt, this is a good idea to promote the effective use of IT to facilitate the work of our Force users.

If you work with lengthy documents or require managing collaborative efforts where several people contribute sections to one document, master documents can make your life a lot easier. A master document contains other Word documents as sub-documents, so you can apply formatting, check spelling, create indexes, and add continuous page numbers, print, or perform other tasks with a whole group of related documents simultaneously while maintaining them as separate documents for editing.

For example, if you are writing a report with several colleagues, individual documents are created, and then you need to assemble them into a master document in order to apply consistent formatting or page numbering, run spelling check on all the files and to print them all in sequence as one report.

Of course, you can insert the contents of other Word documents into a single document by copying and pasting, using the "File" command on the "Insert" menu, or inserting a linked or embedded Word document object inside your current document. But these methods have disadvantages when you want to work with sections independently while at the same time retaining the ability to format all of those sections as one document.

Likewise, inserting a file or copying and pasting from other documents puts the contents of those documents into the destination document. However, if you insert or paste lots of other files, your document will get much larger. In addition, you cannot edit the source files independently and have the changes reflected in the main document. Although you can remedy this by inserting another Word file into your document as a linked object, you will have to format the linked object as a separate document.

You can display the contents of other files as sub-documents in a master document. Sub-documents will retain their identities as individual files, but they are also part of the master document. You can edit a sub-document directly inside the master document or open it separately for editing. Nevertheless, any changes you make to sub-documents will be reflected in the master document by either method.

Next time I will tell you about the elements of a master document and how to create a master document. See you then!

"Sharing IT as it applies to your daily life"

(Email address: "Daniel_KC_To@police. gov.hk")