QuickWords in Word

Evelyn notes that in WordPerfect she could create what were called QuickWords. This is similar to Building Blocks in Word, but QuickWords could do more. With them she could store a complete document, including headers, footers, and formatting, and place that complete document within another document. Building Blocks allow you to store and reuse large blocks of text, but it can't handle entire documents—including headers, footers, and all formatting—like QuickWords could. Evelyn wonders if there is a way to get this enhanced capability in Word.

There are, in Word, two different ways to bring text into your document. The first is through the use of Building Block entries, as Evelyn notes. The second is through the use of the INCLUDETEXT field, which allows you to place the contents of an entire document within the current document. Both approaches are great at getting text into your document, but neither of them go as far as the QuickWords feature of WordPerfect. The biggest difference is in the handling of page-level formatting.

In Word, page-level formatting includes things such as margins, headers, and footers. When you want to change these things within a document, you need to insert a section break and adjust the formatting for the new section. When you insert text using a Building Block or the INCLUDETEXT field, Word doesn't really look at what the page-level formatting was of the text you are inserting.

A way around this, of course, is to insert two section breaks within your document and insert the Building Block or use INCLUDETEXT between the section breaks. Then you can manually format that section to have the page-level formatting you desire.

There is actually another way to get text into your document, and that's with the use of subdocuments. If you create a master document and then pull into the master document subdocuments, the page-level formatting within the subdocuments is used in the final printed document. (This is because when you insert a subdocument into the master document, Word inserts it within its own section, which allows the subdocument's page-level formatting to be different from that of the master document.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12151) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: QuickWords in Word.