MS Word experts: how to "dynamically" create a new document from sections of multiple docs?

[St. Bernard]

Here's what I'm looking to do: I want to create a new document out of certain sections of multiple documents in such a way that whenever the applicable sections of those multiple documents are updated, the new document is as well.

For example, let's say I have five different agricultural reports that contain a whole bunch of information on a number of crops across five regions of the country. However, I want to create a report that focuses specifically on lima beans, and each of those five documents contains a critical section on lima beans. Whenever the sections on lima beans within the five general agricultural reports on lima beans are updated, I also want the report that specifically focuses on lima beans to be updated with this new information.

Obviously this could be done very easily in an online environment via multiple methods. How might this be accomplished using MS Word 2003 for Windoze?

TiA!!!

[Donkey Hotay]

This sounds like a job for "OLE" -- Object Linking and Embedding -- a Microsoft innovation.

More than that, I cannot say; it is beyond the boundaries of my experience. There be dragons there!

[St. Bernard]

Thanks, DH. I know that scary acronym but I too am out of my depths there. Fark.

Anyone else think of something here? I should note that it would be fine for the new 'document' to be something else altogether (e.g. HTML page, XML, whatever) so long as the formatting of the source Word docs was preserved....

[davester]

I think you make a bookmark of the text in the document you want to pull data from, then copy that bookmark, then go to the new document and do Edit Paste Hyperlink. I'm not sure how the hyperlinks get updated but I believe that is roughly the procedure.