Select the product you need help with

You experience a problem when you work with a master document in Word

Article ID: 832771 - View products that this article applies to.

SYMPTOMS

When you try to work with a master document in Microsoft Office Word in a Document Workspace or on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web site, you may experience one or more of the following problems:

When you try to save your master document, subdocuments may be deleted or removed from the master document.
When you open your master document or you try to expand your subdocuments, Word cannot locate your subdocument.
When you try to make changes (edit) to your master document, Word may stop responding (hang).
When you try to save your changes to your subdocuments, your changes are not saved.
When you try to save your master document and subdocuments, you may receive the following error message:
You cannot save while the file is in use by another process. Try saving the file with a new name.
If you choose to make workspace updates available when you open your copy of a document that is stored in a Document Workspace, your copy of the document may appear to save correctly. However, when you reopen the document, changes that you made to the Document Workspace copy of the document may not be synchronized with your copy.

Back to the top | Give Feedback

CAUSE

These problems occur because the master document feature in Word was not designed to work with documents on a SharePoint server, including SharePoint sites that use the Document Workspace feature.

Back to the top | Give Feedback

WORKAROUND

To work around these problems, when you use a Document Workspace or a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web site, convert your master document to a typical Word document. To do this, follow these steps:

Start Word and open your master document.
On the Outlining toolbar, click Expand Subdocuments.
Click inside a subdocument, and then on the Outlining toolbar, click Remove Subdocument.
Repeat step 3 for each subdocument that is contained in your master document.
On the File menu, click Save.

You may also be able to use the INCLUDETEXT field or the RD (Referenced Document) field to work around the issue.
The INCLUDETEXT field lets you "chain" documents together into one main document. The contents of the subdocuments are brought into the main document in the order that the fields are inserted.

Similar to the INCLUDETEXT field, the RD field lets you "chain" subdocuments together. When you use the RD field, all the contents of the subdocuments are not brought into the main document. Instead, Word 2003 references the documents to pull the required information into your main document

For more information about the INCLUDETEXT field, click Microsoft Word Help on the Help menu, type includetext in the Search for box in the Assistance pane, and then click Start searching to view the topic.

For more information about the RD field, click Microsoft Word Help on the Help menu, type rd in the Search for box in the Assistance pane, and then click Start searching to view the topic.

Back to the top | Give Feedback