Advice about Master documents

Make sure that your backups are separate and don't overwrite each other. A
file may corrupt before you realize that it is.

Now I am paranoid all over again grin.

--

Jeff Stevens
Email address deliberately false to avoid spam



"Charles Kenyon" wrote in
message ...
Make sure that your backups are separate and don't overwrite each other. A
file may corrupt before you realize that it is.
--
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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"Jeff" wrote in message
...
Hi Daiya.

Thanks for all the urls. I'll look them up.

I already do frequent backups, so my concern is not about losing the
entire
file, but opening the file and finding the images corrupted, replaced by
red
Xs or something like that. That would be very hard to recover from.

Thanks.

--

Jeff Stevens
Email address deliberately false to avoid spam



"Daiya Mitchell" wrote in message
.. .
See here, for one:
Creating a Table of Contents Spanning Multiple Documents
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/P...cle.asp?ID=148

IncludeText Fields might be an option, though this is a simplistic intro
to
them:
http://daiya.mvps.org/includetext.htm

Steve Hudson [Word Heretic] on how to make Master Documents work safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ma...dhomepage.html

More on why MDs are unreliable:

Why Master Documents corrupt:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Genera...ocsCorrupt.htm

How to recover a Master Document:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Genera...MasterDocs.htm

You are not wrong to worry about putting all eggs in one basket, but the
answer to that is backup frequently--turn on the Make BackUp option as
Anne
said, but also backup frequently yourself.

I am not sure what difference frames may make to any of these options.
Theoretically, none, I think.


On 6/21/05 11:49 AM, "Jeff" wrote:

Hi (using Word 2002 in XP).

I am writing a book that has many chapters. It is a complex book, so
I'm
writing a little in one chapter and a little in another at various
times,
adding ideas as they come along. At present each chapter is in a
separate
file, but that has created a great many separate files and I am looking
for
a way to coordinate them. I therefore thought of the Master document as
a
tool to do this. I used to use the Master document when I was writing
in
WordPerfect 5.1 and it worked very well for me. But I heard that
master
documents have problems and a great risk of corruption in Word. Is
that
true? What kind of problems occur with Master documents. Can they be
avoided?

Any suggestions as to how to maintain a "big picture" of all the
chapters
in
this manuscript? I could of course put them all in one huge file with
the
heading chapters creating a master list in the TOC - and I'm
considering
doing that - but the idea of putting all the eggs in one basket that
might
get corrupted somehow bothers me. Am I wrong to worry about that?

This manuscript has a lot of illustrations (if that makes a difference
in
the responses) and I use frames to position them within the document.

Thanks for any suggestions and ideas.

--
Daiya Mitchell, MVP Mac/Word
Word FAQ: http://www.word.mvps.org/
MacWord Tips: http://www.word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/
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