Ravings of a Textual Deviant

I’m having a geek moment, as I finally figured out how to do something so sensible that it boggles me.

My current job involves a lot of validation technical writing. This means lots of documents that share the same information. I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could make MS Word refer to text in Document A in all the other documents, instead of copying and pasting again into every other document every time Document A gets updated?” And I have found a way to do it. I’m so excited that I just had to share it with everyone. (And six months from now, I’ll have it written down somewhere.)

1. Open Document A
2. Select and copy the text
3. Open Other Document
4. Edit > Paste Special
5. Select Format (I’m using RTF in my Word documents)
6. Select the Paste Link radio button
7. Click OK

Viva single sourcing! And thanks to Mel, who loaned me the how-to book.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2003 at 9:26 am and is filed under What It's Like To Work in IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.