Building Precalculus: an Investigation of Functions

Building Precalculus: an Investigation of Functions

Building Precalculus: An Investigation of Functions

This document will guide you through the process of rebuilding the textbook after making substantial edits. This file contains several macros to help with the process, so if Word gave you a Macro Security warning, be sure to enable macros to take advantage of these.

Building the Traditional Book

In the traditional book, each section is followed by exercises. This is the way the distributed word files are designed. If you make edits, here’s how to update the page numbers, table of contents, and index:

  1. Copy “Front Matter.doc”, “Chapter 1.doc” – “Chapter 8.doc”, “Answers.doc”, “Index.doc”, and this “Builder.doc” file into the C:\temp\ directory. You may need to create this directory if it doesn’t already exist.
  2. Close this document and open the one you just copied into the C:\temp\ directory
  3. Run the macro “BuildPrecalcBook”. In Word 2007, click on the Developer tab, then the Macros button. Select the macro from the list and click Run.
  4. Be patient as the macro updates page numbers, updates the index, and updates the TOC.
  5. Open the “Front Matter.doc” and reformat the table of contents if desired. The auto update sometimes breaks pages in strange places.
  6. If you wish to distribute the book in PDF format, and have Word 2007 or later, you can run the “MakePrecalcPDFs” macro to export each file in PDF format. If you wish to have the entire book as one PDF, you will need to use some kind of PDF software to merge the individual files. PDF Split and Merge ( is a nice free piece of software to do this.

Building the Split Book

In the split book, the narrative text is provided in separate files than the exercises. This would allow you to split the narrative and exercises into separate books.

  1. Copy “Front Matter.doc”, “Chapter 1.doc” – “Chapter 8.doc”, “Answers.doc”, “Index.doc”, and this “Builder.doc” file into the C:\temp\ directory. You may need to create this directory if it doesn’t already exist.
  2. Close this document and open the one you just copied into the C:\temp\ directory
  3. Click the “Show Paragraph markers” button to show paragraph markers
  4. Run the macro “SplitBook”. In Word 2007, click on the Developer tab, then the Macros button. Select the macro from the list and click Run.
  5. Be patient as the macro splits the book into separate –text and –exercises files and adjusts pages numbers.
  6. Open the “Front Matter.doc” file. The TOC is not currently autoupdated for the split book, so you will need to edit the RD field tags (press ALT-F9 to edit them) to point to the files you want to include in the TOC.
  7. You can click the “Show Paragraph markers” button again to hide paragraph markers.
  8. If you wish to distribute the book in PDF format, and have Word 2007 or later, you can run the “MakeSplitPDFs” macro to export each file in PDF format. If you wish to have the entire book as one PDF, you will need to use some kind of PDF software to merge the individual files. PDF Split and Merge ( is a nice free piece of software to do this.
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