Tuesday, June 2, 2009
3 Minute Screencast: Combine Multiple Documents to Create a Master Document
Many times I find people looking in the wrong direction when trying to find a SharePoint solution to one of their business problems. In this case, the question isn’t “How can I use SharePoint to combine multiple documents into a single, master document?” The real question is “How can I combine multiple documents into a single, master document?” It has nothing to do with SharePoint… the documents just happen to reside there.
Take a look and see what I mean.
Bravo! Cannot wait to try this one!
Holy Smokes! This is super cool.
Excellent! Thanks for sharing that.
Great demo, thanks for sharing!
Absolutely brilliant. I understand I really need to learn more about working with Word and Office, I think.
Thanks!
.b
Thanks! This is exactly what I needed to pull together 8 different sections of ‘Monthly Report’ for my team without doing alot of copy/paste.
Great posts!
Thanks,
Arkadiy
Like George said, Bravo.
Careful Mark, before you know it you’ll be branching out to create EndUserOffice.com something of the sort ;-)
Thanks for tips we can distribute to all those end users!
Kevin
Kevin – So did you try the URL: http://www.EndUserOffice.com ? You might be in for a surprise. – Mark
Another shortcut, if you can keep both the SharePoint document library and the Word document in view, you can click-and-drag the link into the { INCLUDETEXT } field tag.
Mark, that’s hilarious! You moved quick on that, didn’t you? :) Well done!
This is great and it will work for our hospital. The different departments can make changes to their reports, briefs and SOPs. This will ready come in handy during our MASCAL and other emergency exercises. Thanks Mark for keeping me employed with all these ‘new’ things.
Thanks for enlightening us with this tip. I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before.
Mark,
For some reason it it not working. It work only once. Any ideas on what went wrong? I notice that your are saved as documents. My documents are saved as .ASPX.
Hope you can help.
Mark,
Got it to work. I forgot that I added the ‘You must checkout’ popup. When I checked out the documents, it worked. Lesson learned, if you have to the ‘You must checkout document popup’ you need to check it out for this to work.
Excellent Mark, simple solutions like that just make me remember all those times banging my head against a brick wall thinking “how will I do that!”
Love these short focused screencasts – can this same solution be applied to multiple document types (powerpoint to powerpoint etc) or a cross integration of the various document types (excel table, powerpoint, and word, etc)?
Tracey – Try it out and let me know :-) — Mark
That’s very interesting thanks. However most users are going to want to edit the text once it’s in the master document. If you do this and update the master document, your edits disappear.
Phil – To me, that would defeat the purpose of letting the content experts maintain the information in their sections. Maybe as a final proof you’d tweak the Master and then archive it, but a governance policy could insist that all changes happen within the section documents. — Mark
Created the master, but updates to the subdocs linking to the master didn’t automatically update the master like I thought it would…hhhmmmm
Also, tried to and reference an xls file but it didn’t work – I have to believe there’s a way but I’ve got to move on for now.
Can this…or somethign similar…be done with Excel spreadsheets?
this is great, but what if you want the master document to pick up files from SP with a relative filepath (for lack of a better word)?
For instance, I have numbersous sites for projects, with similar documents. I would like to copy a master document from one library and have it pick up the like named files out of this document library. ANy clues?
Does this work with office 2010 and sharepoint 2010 as i tried this and got entire webpage show up in word but no text.
please help .
thanks.