To accomplish this, we have broken the report into a collection of smaller documents, each of which is to be written by one or two individuals. Both because of the requirements of the report and the availability of software in the department, we are going to use Microsoft Office to produce the report. The binder will not work because it regards each included document as a new one and begins it on a new page and starts its numbering at 1. The master document is widely acknowledged to be so defective as to be unusable. This leaves only the possibility of using a Word document.
Word documents can include other documents, but the facility that does so is inflexible.
All this is certain to create difficulties. Also, it regards the instructions to insert documents as macros, so it warns the user that the document may harbor a virus. One way around this is to write a program, let s call it DocMaster , that will allow the user to accomplish much the same thing but in a more flexible way. The user will keep a list of documents, call it FileList , and when he drops this list onto the icon of DocMaster , it combines the files in FileList into a single Word document. DocMaster might behave in different ways.