Master/Outline documents of substantial length

G'day "PopS" ,

First up, if you are trying to convert the mess of the files you have
into a single 'flat' file, save each one as XML, HTML or RTF (order of
preference) and use those rtf files to create a new document - you may
avoid some corruption coming through.

Second, 2002. The horses mouth is the MVPs, we all agree there are
serious stability issues with 2002 through every day experience. Let
alone the joys of the Char char etc.

I want to concentrate on the writing, not on the rules of the app I'm using.

Correct. Until that sucker starts to approach 32mb or 2k pages then
there is only social, political or geographical requirements to force
you to use a master.

Finally, I couldn't urge you more strongly to upgrade 2002 to 2003,
especially if you have reasonable-sized documents to manage.


Steve Hudson - Word Heretic

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)
Without prejudice


PopS reckoned:

"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]"
wrote in message
...
Hi PopS

I shall assume you have read everything else in this
thread, and make soe
remarks that may help:
=== Always open to that!

1) Word 97 has the "old" table engine. It will
cause less problems in old
documents, but it will not handle the nested tables
that can occur in Word
2000+ documents. It is not very robust if you need
to get into "mega"
documents.
=== Agreed. 97's only present because I used to use
it to initiate web pages before doing the final
dressups. It was quick for the mundane code and didnt'
bloat. It probably didn't even deserve mention. I
have much better tools now so it'll disappear when I
can "remember" to remove it.

2) Word 2000 is probably the professional's choice
for very long documents.
It lacks the speed and power of later versions, but
also lacks some of the
destructive bugs (sorry: "features") of the later
versions.

3) Word 2002 is a toxic soup of bugs. Don't use it
for anything
substantial.
=== Sorry to hear that since it's what I use, and have
for some time.
You sound pretty convinced but it's the first time I've
heard it; is there any "horse's mouth" I can verify the
details with? Not doubting you, just wondering what
your source is and, well, I'm the curious type g.

4) Word 2003 is what I use when I need to get really
serious. Very fast,
very powerful, not quite as stable as Word 2000 but
the power makes up for
it. You have to know how to turn off the features
that cause problems.
=== lol, what's new there? Fortunately I'm not afraid
to do that and can usually figure out how.

If you have better than 512 MB of memory and Windows
XP on NTFS, you can
push Word 2003 to 5,500 pages in a single document.
If you do, you better
have a fast disk and be good at waiting. But it will
hang in there.
=== Woof! I've got the faster drives, but no 5500
pages in me!! I know what you mean though; even having
been trained to "hurry up and wait", I still am not a
good waiter!
Actually, I've been looking into the Includes:
They're new to me for some reason and I thought they'd
be more complex to use than they are, but it really
looks pretty simple once you get used to it. I might
experiment with that; I've only pulled about 80 pages
into the doc so far, so it's still in a copy/paste-able
state if I needed to recereate a few revised chapters
as separate files.

While you could follow Steve's article and use Master
Documents, I
personally wouldn't... It's a lot of work and I
would not select that
approach for your requirement. Single document and
Outline View is the way
I would go.
=== Steve's article actually looked good, but unless I
had a background approaching his, I don't think that's
the way to go either. His article was good, all due
respect to him, in that it told me how to "break" a MD,
which I did rather quickly thanks to him, and thus (he)
talked me out of using it. I want to concentrate on
the writing, not on the rules of the app I'm using.

But I would do it in Word 2003 on a grunty
workstation.
=== Well, maybe I've found a reason to upgrade; I'm
one of those who don't upgrade for the sake of
upgrading, but maybe I have a reason now. I'll have to
check with my CFO (li'l woman) and see how the
financials are. g

One thing I have figured out is I went from Outline
stages (note type outlines I mean) to wanting to see
final outcome too quickly. I should've practiced
delayed gratification a little longer I guess.

REgards,

PopS


Cheers


On 4/8/05 10:29 AM, in article
, "PopS"
wrote:

=== Inline please:

"Daiya Mitchell"
wrote
in message
.. .
[I don't think any follow-ups are necessary, having
this available in two
places does not seem a problem to me]

I read your post kinda fast, so I may have missed
something.

Is there any good reason to keep your chapters in
different files? Since you
don't seem to be working with other people, why not
just combine all
chapters into one file?

=== Actually, that's what I was trying to say. A
single file and Outline View seem to give me just
what
I need, but then that bit with Word Stopped
Responding
popped its ugly head so I thought I'd check with
some
of the folks here. It happened again, so I did a
Shut
Down/Reboot and tried again; maybe that fixed it; so
far so good.


Though I have not studied Steve Hudson on using
Master Documents safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ma...dhomepage.html
I get the impression that you are never supposed to
do any editing in the
master, but only in the subdocument. So you
shouldn't spend much time in
Master Document view.

=== Same impression here. I suspect one has to be
more intimate with the internals of Word to actually
use MD, or at least have a strict policy to do so.



Your apparent question: Outline View vs. Master
Documents? doesn't totally
make sense to me.

=== Sorry, I was feeling pretty muddled when I
wrote
that. Wish I could take it back and start over but
...


You didn't see anything about using Outline View to
replace Master Documents
because it's irrelevant, more or less.

=== That's what I was hoping to hear. It "seems"
irrelevant, but then MD wasn't an issue until some
folks started trying to use it in earnest.

The alternative to Master Documents is combining in
a
single file. Outline
View makes this much easier, but it is simply a
feature of Word, not exactly
...


(see here just in case you don't know the full
power
of outline view
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLView.htm

=== ?? I have read that, in fact, but didn't
notice
anything about Outline view's powers. I'll take a
look
again; I thought it was all MD info.


It also kinda sounds as though you are editing the
entirety of the work and
may need to move Subsection 3.2 from Chapter 3 to
Chapter 4, in which case I
would say you definitely don't want to be using
MDs,
as my inexperienced
impression is that that's the type of thing that
screws them up, when done
from the MD instead of via cut and paste from file
to
file. A single file,
however, can handle that fine, and Outline View
makes
it easier.

=== Yes, that's exactly what I need to do, and a
lot
of it. These are documents that were accurate "way
back then", but now need some substantial redesign.
The first time I trashed it with MD mode was
moving
chapters around rather than recreate it; it's rather
long. And, I don't do macros so automating a
rebuild
has to be manual for me. The second time I trashed
it,
all I was doing was update the TOC. I was trying to
get an idea how the changes were looking. I guess
you
recreate TOCs too with MDs. I used to be able to
use
MDs in old versions, but apparently not now. I'm
also
not too sure just what resaving all the docs to
current
WD format does to MD things, either.

Thanks for the comeback,

Pop



--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.
Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh.
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

Steve,

Could you elaborate on why you urge strongly to upgrade to Word 2003 for
large documents? We're still using 2002, and simply haven't upgraded
because we were under the impression it didn't have any significant new
features or bug fixes that we were interested in (and were a bit worried
that something would break somewhere! ).

Thanks.

Chip

G'day "Chip Orange" ,

2002 = unstable, new buggy features, shocking new style model etc

2003 contains auto-open magic to fix many issues we have with log
documents, especially resolving the plethora of unused list templates
that we arent allowed to delete.

Additionally, in 2003 you can force the user to use the provided
styles and no manual formatting, which for long docs is especially
useful in keeping 'corruption' and confusion levels down.

Last, Save As XML - a joyous way to keep master document corruption
down to a minimum.


Steve Hudson - Word Heretic

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)
Without prejudice


Chip Orange reckoned:

Steve,

Could you elaborate on why you urge strongly to upgrade to Word 2003 for
large documents? We're still using 2002, and simply haven't upgraded
because we were under the impression it didn't have any significant new
features or bug fixes that we were interested in (and were a bit worried
that something would break somewhere! ).

Thanks.

Chip