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[The following ideas, in no particular order, come from a variety of
posts, with their authors credited. There's some repetition because I
didn't have time to edit. More details are available on the Web...]
SOME METHODS FOR CONDITIONAL TEXT IN WORD
=========================================
- Styles that you hide or show depending on context.
- Custom document properties.
- Includetext fields so that your document takes content from subdocs.
Create a set of subdocs for each context.
- Database-controlled, macro-driven conditionals (I've just completed
something on these lines that provides branded, company-specific
procedures for each company in a group of companies).
(Geoff Lane)
The most basic conditional text mechanism in Word is the IF field, which
tests for bookmark (variable) values. It used to be documented under
"mail merge" because that's what it was developed for. I've used it (as
far back as Word 2.0 for Windows) to create complex variations of user
and admin docs from a single source.
(David Brown)
Create a single Word document with styles for A, B, and C. Each of the
three letters has its own set of styles in the document: Body Text A,
Body Text B, etc.
Create three different templates: In Template 1, style B and C are
hidden text. In Template 2, style C is hidden. In Template 3, none of
the styles are hidden.
Conditional text is displayed according to the template that you link to
the document -- the document itself doesn't change.
(Dan Goldstein)
If you have RoboHelp, you could use it to create your documents, and
then export to word. You can mark topics for inclusion or exclusion when
exporting to word. You could then have three different word outputs from
the same source project.
(Richard Sharon)
In reality, Word's IF field code is more powerful than FrameMaker's
conditional text implementation because it supports Boolean operators...
In Word, you can use AND and OR operators or nested IF fields when
building the IF fields to conditionalize text, and this gives much more
control over the rules that you can construct. On the other hand, the
need to specify every item of conditional content inside these complex
field codes is really cumbersome.
(Fred Ridder)
I recommend using a color or special font for your conditional text.
Then, when you run the index for the smaller subset (with conditional
text off), you can delete those extra lines from your index very easily.
(Seth Maislin)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Hood
> Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 5:03 PM
> To: Dan Goldstein; TECHWR-L
> Subject: RE: Conditional Text Question
>
> ... About free methods for doing conditional text
> in Word -- I'd appreciate some info on them. I
> have my own homebrewed methods but they're kind
> of clumsy. I'd really like to find something both
> effective and simpler.
>
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