Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Master Documents

In the beginning, there was Word 5.1. It had fonts, sizes, styles, tables, and graphics. But the people weren’t satisfied. They wanted to bind together many different chapter documents into a single, unified book. They wanted to knit together files written by multiple authors who had edited their respective sections simultaneously on the network. They wanted to print, spell check, or find-and-replace across dozens of different Word files at once, or generate tables of contents, indexes, and cross-references for all component Word files at once.

On the sixth day, Microsoft created the Master Document. (Really, it looks like they created it on the fifth day. They saved the sixth for Notebook Layout view and Zune.) Notebook is perhaps the simplest form of outlining, while Outline view is more capable, more complex. Finally, Master documents are the Mother Lode of document organization.

But on the 2008th day—or version—Microsoft decided that this might be just too much for the average Word fan to comprehend and hid access to this feature behind an innocuous button in the Outlining toolbar. No longer would the multitudes be mystified by Master Document in the View menu.

Without a doubt, a Master Document looks much like an outline. However, each heading in the Master Document can refer to a section or an entirely different Word file. As in the Document Map, you click these headings in Master Document view to travel directly from one part of the overall document to another. ...