Batch print (Word 97 SR2 Win95)

Topic

New Reply

Hoping that someone can point me to some suitable software.

We are a doc control team distributing manuals – each manual is made up of Word docs.

Occasionally we are asked to produce a “special” manual consisting of docs from various manuals. At present I drag all the docs into Binder and print from there. I then save the binder as “special manual”.

The problem is that Binder does not just point to files – it holds a copy of the file in the binder. So if the original file is updated and then Binder opened, the Binder copy is not updated.

Does anybody know of anything like Binder but that updates automatically or on command?

Would the Master Doc feature in Word do this? I was bought up on Ventura and after a couple of disastrous attempts with master doc I gave it up. However after reading Dreamboat’s masterly exposition recently I’m tempted. But I’d rather not!

David

Reply | Quote

Replies

Maybe you can create a new document and insert the requested documents as links. You’d be using the INCLUDETEXT field.

Ingrid

Reply | Quote

Good idea – I tried it and it worked. However the source document has to have the same template as the linked docs which is not my case.

It has just ocurred to me that it would probably be easier just to have a macro that prints the listed docs in turn. I could probably list the docs in a table then the macro could look in each cell for the doc to print.

However it surprises me that there does not seem to be something around that will do this – there must be other people out there that want to print batches of docs.

Reply | Quote

Hi Solomod:
Why do you say the source documents must have the same attached template as the target document? That isn’t necessary for the field to work. Just remember to put the full path in the INCLUDETEXT field (if the source & targets are in different folders), to put quotes around the path (if there are spaces in the name), & USE DOUBLE in the filepaths.

Reply | Quote

I had a document (the source) containing the includetext fields that linked to three docs – the first two docs had one template and the last a different. All the docs were in the same folder.

The docs printed but all used the header & footers of the first doc and the last doc – with the different template – was all over the place.

David

Reply | Quote

Hi David:

Well, I’m not sure what happened in that situation, but just for your information, it doesn’t matter whether documents have the same template or not when using the INCLUDETEXT field. When you use the INCLUDETEXT field, the body of the document is brought into the target document. The page setup, headers, & footers of the target document are used. If you put an INCLUDEFIELD in a header/footer, you might get some unusual results if the amount of text is too great.

Now if you bookmark a header in a source document & insert it into the target documents header, you might end up pushing text out of the margin, but otherwise…it shouldn’t.

Hope this helps.

Reply | Quote