BlogOffice

I've been writing about Word for oh, a dozen years or more now, and I was temporarily tripped up by a very simple thing yesterday. I've just submitted a new book to a publisher, and in order to give them the whole scope and feel of the project at once, I use Word's master- and subdocument feature to combine the chapters into the whole. I then added the TOC and so forth. When I e-mailed the file to the editor, I quickly got a note back. "Errrr...sorry, but all that's in this file is your Intro and a bunch of links."

What? I took a look at the file and sure enough, they were right. When I was working with the full document everything looked expanded and fine, but the file hadn't saved that way. So I expanded all the documents, clicked Unlink, and resaved and sent the document. Except. "Well, Kathy, this time I can see the Intro and Chapter 7. But the rest of the chapters are still links."

So, the moral to this story for me is that (1) even though your document may appear to be whole and complete with all subdocs expanded, you have to unlink them before you can share the doc with someone else; and (2) press Ctrl+A to select the whole document before you click Unlink or you'll only unlink the subdocument at the cursor position.

It's simple, but one of those things you can forget if you don't do it very often. Now, I hope they like the book. :)