Lawyer is using a electric drill when should be using a chisel. IncludeText
is the the electric drill, AutoText is the chisel.
--
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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wrote in message
oups.com...
I've seen postings on this going back as far as 2002, but never found a
efinitive answer. Microsoft doesn't seem to address this in their
knowledge base, yet this appears to be an old problem. Here's the
scoop...

Lawyer is using Word XP and has a master document with boilerplate
text, we'll call it master.doc. He creates 20 or so "child documents"
that must include some of the text from the boilerplate. He goes
through the master and creates a bookmark for each section of text he
wants to use as a unit.

In the child documents he includes the boilerplate with the following:

{ INCLUDETEXT "master.doc" BookmarkName }

He IS doing this correctly, because the field is replaced with the
proper text and all is right with his world.

At some later point (it doesn't seem to matter whether he has closed
the document and reopened it) he refreshes the field. SOMETIMES (it
happens often, but not predictably) the field now reads "Error! Not a
valid file name." Toggling the field text reveals that the field now
reads thus:

{ INCLUDETEXT "master.doc BookmarkName" }

Note that the bookmark has been added to the file name, so that now the
filed points to a non-existent file (hence the error.) Manually
"fixing" the field does not work - Word continues to mangle the name
until the original document is renamed and the field modified to
reflect the new name.

No files have been moved, no paths changed, all the documents are in
the same directory, etc. The fact that Word will not accept even a
manual change to the field wthout renaming the file is particularly
disconcerting.

Does anybody have any information on this? And how to fix this?