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On Thursday, March 8, 2018 11:26 AM, Paul Hanson wrote:
Subject: RE: Creating Technical Documents in Word
If I had that need, I would create a bookmark at whatever line number I needed and insert a cross-reference. It'd be kind of cool to set up, but I have no real reason to do so in the work I do. Instead, I have other plans for MS Word. I have 300-ish Word docs linked to my RoboHelp project. The majority of those MS Word documents are maintained by other teams in my department (disaster recovery documentation) and I use RoboHelp to assemble a browser-based output. I created a "standards" document with the standard headings I wanted to have in each MS Word document as well as the standard header and footer. For each heading in the standards document, I assigned a bookmark. Then, in each of those 300-ish Word documents, I use a field to create a cross-reference back to the standards document. For example, I have each of the headings set up to use the "Title" in the document as part of the heading, followed by a dash. If I want to use the "Title" in the document as part of the heading, followed by a > instead of a dash (I don't, but for the sake of this example, let's say I do), all I have to do is replace the - with > in my standards document and run a macro. The macro processes each MS Word document in my directory structure and refreshes all fields in each MS Word document. Thus, in a matter of minutes, I can make global changes to 300-ish Word documents. In the near future, I'm going to investigate adding screenshots in my standards document so that if I have the same screenshot in multiple MS Word documents, I can follow the methodology I have in place for the headings. This is a new idea to me that I haven't fleshed out entirely, but, in theory, I'm very excited about it.
All I'm saying is MS Word is a powerful tool for my daily work.
-----Original Message-----
From: On Behalf Of kafkascampi
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2018 12:07 PM
To: Cardimon, Craig
Cc: TechWhirl (techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com)
Subject: Re: Creating Technical Documents in Word
I broke out in a cold sweat when I read the words "restart each section". Word sections have felled braver men than you or I.
I still produce some documents in Word, but only very short tipsheets and similar.
If you are asking about numbering lines within your document, it doesn't seem clear to me from the linked article what the benefit would be. Maybe if you have them visible only to you as the author, it can help with formatting. Or are you outputting them, as in a legal doc?
The article says it can be useful for reference points, but wouldn't you just be adding references like anchors?
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