Working with Master and Sub-docuemnts

I have been reading recently that Masters Documents are starting to work in 2010 but still then flakily,  but am not sure in 2007.

One thing is for sure, Master Documents has never worked in Word and until I see absolute proof from every MVP on this forum that they work safely, I will not start using them.

See http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm

So in your case I would seriously consider combining the separate documents to rescue your project.

Word can handle very large documents indeed, both in page numbers and file size so don't be worried about that.

As an alternative, see the following page of MVP Daiya Mitchell's website:

http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm

If in doubt, don't. ;-)

All the best

DeanH

What is the exact error message you get while saving the Word document?

Do you get this error while saving a file that has a master document or when you try to save any Word document?

Try the steps mentioned below:

1.       Create a test Word document.

2.       Try to save the document  and check.

3.       If you get the “File Permission error”   then refer the link below that discusses about the same:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordcreate/thread/18d51e39-f745-487c-b12c-11eb950dc1f2

I would urge you to combine the documents into one file - http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm

[Moderator note: removed excessive quoting]

I have to agree with the other replies, Master/Sub is a feature that MS keeps touting but after 20 years of trying still hasn't got it to work. Long ago, they added it as a "me too" feature to match WordPerfect, where it was a great feature that worked as advertised.

I used the feature in a large document 10 years ago in Word 97, but eventually had to give it up. Recently I tried it Word 2007 and in the Word 2010 beta, still no luck.

I have found that Word 2007/2010 on a reasonably current computer can handle surprisingly large documents. I have some up to 1500-2000 pages with lots of screen captures. Try merging (copies of) all of your files into one to see if it is workable.

If you have to come up with unified page numbering, you could keep your files separate until the final version.  I would suggest you keep the original sub files so that if you have to make changes you have the original source rather than the large merged file.

I am mystified by all this negative talk regarding Word master/sub docs.  I've used it for several books over various versions of Word and never had any real problems with it--until now, that is,

Hi Jerry,

I've used them a fair bit and have never encountered any issues. One thing to be aware of when linking to source documents with different headers/footers is that you need to have at least a continuous Section break right at the top of the source documents, with the 'same as previous' for the next Section disabled. That's because the page layout, including headers/footers, from the source document's first Section don't carry over.