Reusing Content

Megan and I did go to see my mother last night. She was in a really good mood.

Meanwhile, one other thing about this week at work. In the user guides I work with in MS Word, I’ve found a really powerful strategy. I can create a cross reference to a numbered step. This has helped me out a lot with steps in procedures that are repeated in multiple procedures. For example:

Procedure 1
1. Go to Path 1 > Path 2.
2. Edit this.
3. Do That.
4. Click Save.

Procedure 2
1. Go to Path 1 > Path 2.
2. Do That.
3. Edit this.
4. Click Save.


I set up cross references to each numbered step in Procedure 2 to each numbered step in Procedure 1, assuming all the text is the same. Then, if I make a change to any text in any of the steps in Procedure 1, that text is updated in Procedure 2.I was working with content that had the exact same navigation path. As I played around with the wording of the navigation, I was able to update all 4 procedures very quickly. 

Coupled with this macro, my life has become much more automated:

Sub RefreshAllFields()
' Macro to update whole document, Fields and TOCs
Dim oStory As Range
Dim oTOC As TableOfContents
Dim oTOF As TableOfFigures
  For Each oStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
    oStory.Fields.Update
    If oStory.StoryType <> wdMainTextStory Then
      While Not (oStory.NextStoryRange Is Nothing)
        Set oStory = oStory.NextStoryRange
        oStory.Fields.Update
      Wend
    End If
  Next oStory
For Each oTOC In ActiveDocument.TablesOfContents
        oTOC.Update
    Next oTOC
For Each oTOF In ActiveDocument.TablesOfFigures
        oTOF.Update
    Next oTOF
    ActiveDocument.Save
End Sub