Is this possible with MS Word?

February 3, 2021 9:03 AM

I'm looking to create a series of manuals that share information. I want to be able to create a library of Word documents stored on the SharePoint cloud and then other documents that combine any of the library documents into them dynamically so that when a change is made to the library, every document that shares that embedded information is updated.

For example, I have documents A-Z, each with it's own content. Can I create a series of other documents, let's call then Manuals 1-10, that pull from and share contents from those A-Z documents, such that when I need to update the manuals that share content, I only need to upate the A-Z documents and the manuals will be automatically updated with the new content, when everything lives on the SharePoint cloud in my organization?

I've played around in Word and can embed document contents as "objects" into the manuals, but the field is not dynamic, so when I change the original document, the manual with the inserted object is not updated dynamically.

posted by archimago to Technology (3 answers total)

There used to be a capability in Word, parent (master)/child documents - but, when I tested a few years ago, it did not work with SharePoint or SharePoint Online libraries - only folders. (And others report it as an issue)

And - it might still have required manual updating, IIRC.

However... you could try synchronizing the library/folder using the OneDrive client (Microsoft suggest this here) - then making the parent/child document locally and see how that works.

In my experience, organizations that needed to do this in a structured manner would build something custom, with structured lists/attachments (or sometimes with a "Document Set"), workflow (PowerAutomate / Flow), etc.

They would then generate a final document, typically in PDF - although some would bring it into a Word doc.

There might be applications/solutions you can purchase, instead of custom building something (the custom ones I knew about cost "Enterprise consulting" rates...) - the keywords that you are looking for are: "document production" or "document automation".

Of course - another alternative is... Why have a document at all? Use pages/wiki's - but, the in all the times I have seen this, the final document needed to have a static version number "of a point in time", which could be referred to, for legal purposes. (i.e. a collective agreement, a technical operations manual). So, dynamic webpages didn't work for those scenarios - I have seen some attempts to gather a set of webpages and export them into a Word doc/PDF, but no one was ever happy with the end-result (formatting, etc.)
posted by rozcakj at 9:28 AM on February 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

heh... time marches on... Apparently you can turn a "Document Set" into a PDF using PowerAutomate...

And another one...

So - at that point, I would consider adding some metadata columns to the Document Library to control the order in which documents are to be joined, then, perhaps a view that filters based on that metadata, then use PowerAutomate to stitch together the final result.
posted by rozcakj at 9:38 AM on February 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is an important aspect of a lot of technical writing. I would argue that Word is not the right tool for it (I would argue that Word is not the right tool, period, but I digress). If you want to dig into other solutions that are designed for this, search for "component content management systems."
posted by adamrice at 11:58 AM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]