@chadteter:
You can place an INDD as a graphic, and like any placed file it will update via the links panel. That takes care of pages or sections that are common to all the manuals in a set. There are other InDesign features you can use that will speed things up even more.
Here's one possible workflow. First you need to set up the documents for each of your product lines. As with any production line, a bit of preparation up front can save you many hours of work down the road:
- Create individual INDD documents for each of the common pages or sets of pages within the booklets, and replace the current static text with your newly-created subsection(s).
- Create a new InDesign book (File>New>Book), and in the book panel flyout menu, under Page Numbering Options and UNCHECK “Automatically Update Page Numbers”. Leave the other defaults.
- Add all the booklets for a product line to that book.
- Just to be really safe against future accidents, select each document in turn in the book panel and change the Docuemnt Numbering Options to start page numbering at 1.
- Save the book and the documents.
Weeks go by, and now you have some changes to make. Modify the common pages that are in the separate .indd you created in step 1, then open the .indb book file from step 2.
Open all the booklets at once by selecting all in the book panel and double-clicking on any one of them.
Now that you have all the booklets open, you can update the links by selecting “Update All Links” from the links panel flyout menu in each document. Assign a keyboard shortcut to it, for greater speed, or for warp speed use a simple script that cycles through the open documents and does this (make sure the dilithium crystals aren't cracked, Scotty).
Anything that needs a Find/Change (such as part numbers) can be done for all documents at once by choosing “All Documents” in the Find/Change dialog. (Depending on how the changes go in a particular cycle, you might be able to do ALL of the edits using Find/Change.)
If you've been using individual copy/paste up to now, the above should save you a day or so per set of changes, reduce the chance of carpal tunnel syndrome, improve your digestion and speed up the Earth's rotation by a nanosecond or two.
An added benefit of the Book Panel approach is that if you ever need to modify the paragraph or character styles in the booklets (management decides that all headings in all corporate communications should be in Comic Sans, let's say, and you need the job too much to resign in protest) you can change the styles in one document, then use the Synchronize function in the book panel to update all the rest automatically. (You do have paragraph for everything, and character styles wherever needed, right? — Thought so.)
Monday's come and gone by now, but I hope this helps for the future!
.
