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Looking for software to manage and merge various MS word documents

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kenner81:
I work pretty much on manuals.  For example if the hardware requirements change, I'd rather create a chapter or page entitled "hardware requirements" , edit that document, then have a program replace that chapter/page with my new chapter/page in all of the documents that use that chapter/page rather than manually go through each one.

I'll review each recommendation to see which works best for me.

AndyM:
You can use Word for this, not sure it's the best approach.

Use bookmarks.  Bookmark your chapters, perhaps giving them dates/version numbers in the name (Ch4.2012-07-12, Ch4.3ver2, etc)

Then have one summary doc that is simply a list of links to the latest/desired chapters.  Edit the links when they require updating.  You can either print from that, or copy the content to an updated separate file.  What you can't do is edit the chapters from the file with the links.

You'd still have to keep track of which files contained the current/desired chapters.

Target:
rather than bookmarks I think I'd try working with mailmerge...

maybe a bit fiddly to set up, but you can use merges to regenerate the documents.

You'd still need to keep a master list of documents and their components to track the changes, but it seems like automating the merges should be do-able in VBA

How many documents are we talking about all up?

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