A word to the Word-Wise

It's been many a long year since I last had to struggle with Microsoft Word (aka "Microsoft Weird"), especially with the master document feature. This is a seemingly useful way to incorporate several individual MS Word files together into one book or volume. It's also the easiest way to force yourself to recreate your documents from scratch, as the feature is notorious for corrupting the documents you include into your master document. This FAQ exactly captures the situation with MS Word master documents:

When we say you "lose" your master document, this "loss" can take many forms. You wouldn't be reading this at all if you had not so far experienced one of the lesser forms. You can still read "some" of your text, right? Trust me, it can get worse! The ultimate master document corruption results in some or all of the text paragraphs disappearing. Once this happens, there is no way to get them back: they are no longer in the file. Which can be very disconcerting if the corruption happened several weeks ago, and because you were not looking at that part of the document, you didn't find out about it until you came to print the whole thing, by which time you had long since over-written your backup!

A master document has only two possible states: Corrupt, or just about to be corrupt. And that is why we say that the only possible fix to a master document is "don't use it!"