Cutting a Word Document

Cptralls

Hi,

I have a Word document, it has information on it which is mostly generic, however, there are areas within it that relate to 4 different sections. So when I want a document with only items for "Section 1", I have to do a manual cut which can sometimes be time consuming and it runs the risk of errors (cutting the wrong items), is there a tool on Word that can do automatic cuts based on the sections?

Thanks in advance. 

400ixl

You can create section breaks in Word. These can be done so that the text is contoinouos or page breaks etc.

Select where you want a section to start and then from the top menu > Insert > Break > Section (depending on the type you want). Then when you go to print you can print the sections you want in a similar way to pages.

Do a search for word section breaks in a search engine and it will reveal all.

GDB2222

I think this does what you want:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/conditional-statements-to-include-or-drop-entire/5647b8b7-d994-4796-b600-22fa9e498a8f

GDB2222

Or this:

https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/35222-how-make-sections-hidden-appear-based-selection.html

Short version is that it isn't that easy.

Brie

Is this something that might be possible with a merge function?  If the word document has the generic bits only and then have a way to select one of the four bits from the other document?  I've done merges with things from excel going into a work document but don't know if that would work in this situation.

GDB2222

Brie said:

Is this something that might be possible with a merge function?  If the word document has the generic bits only and then have a way to select one of the four bits from the other document?  I've done merges with things from excel going into a work document but don't know if that would work in this situation.

I used to do this commercially using Mailmerge, some years ago, for a major plc. I had an extremely complicated template that was just on the border of what Word could handle, ie it was really buggy. However, I was really, really pusing it, with multiple versions in the same document.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/set-the-rules-for-a-mail-merge-d546ee7e-ab7a-4d6d-b488-41f9e4bd1409#:~:text=Place your cursor where you want the conditional text to,will determine the conditional text.

If the op is happy with mailmerge, the above article describes how to do it.

Cptralls

Thanks all, a few potential solutions provided but nothing is proving easy.

outtatune

This tutorial kind of assumes you know the basics of mailmerge but if you do it's a nice illustration of how to use conditional mailmerge for exactly this kind of thing.

Magnolia

Create 4 documents named section1, section2, section3 etc or what ever you choose to call them for ease.

Just go in and edit out section 2, 3 and 4 from the first document and repeat deleting the relevant parts from the other files.

This may mean merging each section individually.  Could be an easy option if the sections are separate in the data base.