Using content from linked Word documents in Snippets or Variables?

Right. We use snippets and variables often. I was just wondering if there was some way to connect our content outside of RoboHelp so that our Word documents and RoboHelp could have a common source for some of these bits of information. It sounds like that's not possible though.

For example, we might have a sentence like "The system supports Microsoft SQL Server 2012, 2016, and 2017." that appears in maybe 50 places all over our documentation. Then in the next release they drop support for SQL Server 2012 and add support for SQL Server 2019. What we would like to have is those kinds of phrases or even some longer content that can be in a single source file that gets pushed to all of the documents that include that information. Is that possible?

That's exactly what a snippet does. You create the snippet and insert it into as many topics as you like. When the content of the snippet is changed, the topics containing that snippet all update automatically.

They only bit missing is you can't source that snippet externally. 

Is there any way to link content from an external document and use it within a topic in RoboHelp? I see how you can link entire documents as topics, but what if you want to embed content within an existing topic?

For example, we might have a sentence like "The system supports Microsoft SQL Server 2012, 2016, and 2017." that appears in maybe 50 places all over our documentation. Then in the next release they drop support for SQL Server 2012 and add support for SQL Server 2019. What we would like to have is those kinds of phrases or even some longer content that can be in a single source file that gets pushed to all of the documents that include that information. Is that possible?

Snippets and variables cannot be sourced from topics so I can't see how RoboHelp could work with a linked Word document to do what can't be done from topics.

I think there's also the practical issue that if someone changes the content of the linked document, how are you going to check the snippets and variables still make sense?

Unfortunately I'm not aware of any such functionality, although I haven't worked with linked word documents since Winhelp. 😛

I can imagine a complicated extendscript to extract some content from the linked topics and replace existing snippet content, but whether it would work I don't know, and would require a developer to write for you. And whether it's worth it given the script would have to be re-written when you upgrade to New UI is another question... (If you have the resources to implement, I could describe my idea for you.)