MS Word question

[Blackhawk]

I'm getting ready to start a fairly complex personal project. It will involve (guessing) three seperate journals and three seperate reference texts, all written by me, going back and forth between them.

What I want is a way to combine them so that I don't have to have six seperate Word documents. I'd like to have two - one for the journals, one for the reference material, but I don't want them all to be in the same vertical document. The way I'd like to work on it would be something like what Excel does - multiple 'sheets', all seperate, but which are contained within a single document, which you can switch between at will at will as you work.

Let me try to clarify that a bit. If Excel were a word processor, I'd create a document called 'Journals', then I'd have the little tabs at the bottom labeled, say, "Personal", "Experiments", and "Observations" (those are off the top of my head examples.) I'd be able to open, save, and manage the one file, "Journals.xls", but still have three completely seperate sets of data inside.

Excel isn't a word processor, though. Is there any way, whatsoever, to do this in Microsoft Word? I tried Office help, but it is so overstuffed that it is useless unless you know the correct term to search for.

[ChrisGrenard]

That would be a damn cool feature. afaik, I don't think it can be done. However, I really do like that idea.

[Grundbegriff]

This sounds like a job for the excellent, freeware program Keynote, which is sort of like a tabbed version of wordpad alongside an expandable hierarchy tree. As the site says, "The basic idea in KeyNote is that you can include many separate notes within a single file."

[Freezer-TPF-]

You might look into outliner-type programs that keep an outline off to the side and separate "articles" or documents in the main portion of the screen.

/edit: Yes, what Grundbegriff just posted above is exactly what I was thinking. That Keynote software looks great -- might try that out myself. I have an old outliner called Treepad that I use at work. It is lean and mean, but it is rather light on features.

[Kasey Chang]

If you MUST do it in Word, what you do is create a Master Document, and then put in links to the subdocuments. Then when you edit the master document you can jump to the subdocuments and edit them in place, or open them and edit them separately. But exactly like the way you described... Not with Word.

[Blackhawk]

I spent some time with Keynote. There are a few things, though, that make it less practical for me. You can't imbed jpegs, something I do fairly regularly (only bitmaps or .gifs). I don't feel like converting every image I need. You can't export to .html, something I haven't had to do, but is extremely likely in the future. You can't fiddle with the page background, which is just a personal preference, but seeing as how this is a personal project, something I like to be able to do.

It was a good suggestion, though - it did what I needed it to do, although it is more of a tabbed version of WordPad than of Word.

I'll likely just stick with mulitple Word documents. Thanks for the input anyway!

[Smoove_B]

I've got my people on it. And by my people, I mean "Wife - Mistress of Word".

[Smoove_B]

As near as I can tell, you need to create something in Word called a Master Document.

Then, you can create cross references (do a Help search) to bounce around.

I also stumbled onto this document entitled How to Make Long Documents in Word which seems to be an overview of the process.

If I find out more, I'll post it.

[LawBeefaroni]

What about Microsoft Office Binder? I have it at work, I've never used it but I did pull it up to take a look around. It opens a window for your "binder" which is just a set of documents (Word, excel, PowerPoint, maybe HTML). There's a tab bar on the left and the main screen is the document. Technically everything isn't in the same document but binder has the tab and management features you mentioned.