Using Excel to Update Word Documents?

Hello,

I'm trying to find a solution to a very tedious task that I have. I'm in a work center that uses hundreds of word documents as checklists that tell us which people to contact and with what type of information depending on any number of scenarios that come up.
Each of these checklists contains a list of positions, with the name and phone number of each person that holds the position next to it. If you can imagine, every now and than a name or phone number might change for any particular position. When that happens, I'm the guy responsible for making sure every checklist is updated with the correct information.

Each of our checklists have usually 60-70% of the same contacts. I can actually compile them all into one list. I'm trying to see if I can use this list (maybe in excel?) and modify it anytime we have changes, to update each of the word documents automatically.

I know an easy solution to this would be to just make the checklists in excel, and have each phone number in a cell connected to my contact list, but the kicker is that I have to stick with word when it comes to the checklists...

Anyone know of how I can make this happen? Maybe have a couple good pointers?

I would approach it by keeping the contact lists in Excel;
creating word files with NO contacts in them,
creating a Bookmark in these word documents where the contacts are to be inserted

It is then a fairly simple matter to (from Excel) loop through all the word documents inserting a list of contacts and aving the modified files to a different location (and Name).


In Excel you could have a table of word documents*roles and contacts