Office/Word 2000 ---
I have been helping a friend as she is writing a small book. Twenty
chapters and 144 pages.  We have been using the Master Document method
to organize things.

This person is not a power user and keep it simple is always the watch
word here.  She has struggled with the outline features and editing and
formatting of the document.  She hasn't been savy about using styles
consistently, and things I would do to facilitate formatting.

That said, over the last 6 mos. we have had this master document lock up
on us and crash a number of times. I can't remember how many times I
have had to fix it for her!  Initially I thought it was because her lap
top computer was somewhat dated and lacked enough RAM, but we just
migrated everything to a new HP Pavillion Desktop with plenty of power.

Well it just crashed again. So I decided to do some searching on Master
Documents to see what is wrong.  I uncovered a number of sources saying
MDs are bad, inherintly buggy, don't use them under any circumstances.

One of these articles suggests using the INCLUDETEXT or RD Field instead.

Can any of you offer advice on these options.  It sounds like the RD
Field would be a pain because we want to do a TOC and Index.

If you use INCLUDETEXT fields is it best to link to file or just
include?  Have people run into problems with the links breaking?
Formatting screwing up, etc?

Thanks in advance for any sage advice, I can't tell you how stressful
this has become, we have actually considered going out and buying a
different program like Adobe pagemaker or something.  There has got to
be an easier way to do this in Word.

RL