If you are an MS Word user, and we all have secret shames in our pasts, you may have fallen into the habit of avoiding master documents--and for good reason. Master documents in MS Word can crash and corrupt sub-documents unless they are used so carefully that there is hardly any reason to use them at all.

But if you have this habit of avoiding master documents, you can change it when you use OpenOffice.org Writer. Master documents in Writer are much more stable. They are not immune to crashes, but unless a master document's size exceeds the available RAM on your computer, you may never see one. This stability frees master documents in Writer to be what they were meant to be: a way to organize and write long documents more efficiently.

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