Creating a master document in Word
by Christine Davis
Christine Davis has made this document available for personal non-profit-making educational use by UniSA research students and staff only.
Advantages of MDs to thesis writers
At some point you will need to bring all of your chapters together to create one ‘thing’. Then you can do lists (contents, illustrations, tables and figures) page numbering, and preliminary pages (title page, the abstract etc).
If you have many pages in the whole thing and lots of tables and charts then just copying all of the documents into one HUGE document is a problem. Scrolling through the pages to sort out layout and formatting and to check the detail will be very slow.
So Word has Master Document.
You can use it from the start but that’s not recommended. It’s a cumbersome system to use when you’re still writing.
However, when all of your separate chapters are finished and you’re really sure there are very few changes to make, create a Master Document. It allows you to create and work in a virtual document which links to all of the component chapters (called subdocuments by Word). Scrolling through to check stuff (like whether page breaks are where you want them, and whether there’s a paragraph space at the top of a page that you need to get rid of and so on) becomes much faster and easier.
Before setting up Master Document, you need to have your documents well-formatted using the same template and styles.
Setting up Master Document
You will start with an Outline View and add subdocuments. (You’re actually adding links to each chunk—e.g. a chapter or a section of your book.)
Your master file contains only the links—no text in its own right—even though it seems as if it does when you’re working in it.
1.	Make sure all of your chunks have the same styles and template 
(use Organizer [Tools> Templates and Add-ins> Organizer] to help you make the styles the same).
You also need to use the same template throughout—learn how to Attach Template from the Help line or this website if you don’t know already.
2.	Name your chunks in a way which makes sense to you and tells you their order in the final document (e.g. 00, 01, 02, 03,).
3.	Save a copy of the most recent version of all the chunks in the same folder.
4.	To create your Master Document in the same folder:
a)	Open New document
b)	Open View > Outline
c)	Click Expand subdocuments on Outline toolbar
d)	Insert at least one paragraph space for manoeuvring
e)	Insert cursor at selected point
f)	Click on Insert subdocument on Outline toolbar
g)	In File name box insert required file and click Open—Word inserts a Next page and Continuous section break 
h)	Repeat d–h until all chunks are in Master Document (make sure you do the paragraph breaks as that makes a difference to how easily you can work around things when you are working in the master document).
5.	Save Master Document (e.g. Thesis Master Version 3) in the same folder.
6.	When you go into the master document to change anything or add page numbering or whatever, you’ll find the document opens as a series of locked links to the various chunks.
Go to View>Select Outline—you’ll then get the whole combined document on the screen in outline format. From then on you can change the view to Normal or Print, whichever you prefer for working in.
7.	Once you’ve created a master document, Word will combine the chunks and do page numbering etc.
Creating a reference list
To create one reference list for the combined document:
1.	Open your EndNote library
2.	Turn off Cite While You Write
3.	Unformat all citations if you’ve formatted them in your separate documents
4.	Tell EndNote to Format Bibliography
You’ll get the reference list for the whole document which you can then format as you require.
Lists of contents, figures and tables
You can also do common lists of contents, figures, tables etc.
1.	Insert > Reference > Index and Tables>Table of Contents or …
2.	Label figures using Styles or Captions as you go along so that making the table is easy.
Always use styles consistently so that Word can add items to the Lists in a flash.
Editing hint
Items like lists of contents, bibliographies etc are fields. They are usually shaded grey and when you select them the whole thing is selected—e.g. the whole reference list not just the item you want to alter. If you want to edit a tiny item in one of those then you need to get rid of the codes calling them a field.
Select the item then use Shift-Control-F9. You’ll just have text which you can then edit or reformat very easily.