Stability of using cross reference vs. hyperlink for huge document

Cross-references and hyperlinks both use fields. Word can support up to 2,147,483,647 fields in a single document. The advantages of cross-references over hyperlinks include:

• the link name updates to reflect changes in the target name;

• look like normal text (not hyperlinks) for documents that are to be printed.

Thanks for your reply.

But as far as I know, plain hyperlink does not use field. The display name of hyperlink is not affected by field update when the target's name is changed, isn't it?

Back to cross reference (xref), would it be safe to add xref to sub-documents first and then join them by master document function? No hazard of conflict or broken links?

Each sub-documents will contain several hundreds to thousands of xref and master will have about 10~15 thousands of xref.

Your reference to the use of a master document is worrying. These are notoriously unstable and prone to catastrophic data loss. See:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm

Although these articles are some years old, all Word versions similarly affected. See also:

http://www.addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm

Since Word can handle documents of up to 512Mb in size, with 32Mb of text, I doubt that you'd need more than a single document. If you prefer to work with separate documents and link them, you can do that via INCLUDETEXT fields. However, cross-referencing (or hyperlinking) content across separate documents is much less straightforward than doing it within a document.