If you use Word heavily, you’ve probably come across a situation where it would be convenient to combine multiple Word documents into one master document. While it’s not very difficult to do in Word, it’s also not very intuitive.
You might think that Microsoft would include some sort of document merge functionality in the program, given how many other more complex tasks it can perform. Anyway, in this article, I will show you a quick and easy way to combine multiple Word documents into one document.
It’s worth noting that the procedure pretty much works in all versions of Office from 2007 to 2016. Also, in my own tests, it seems that all formatting was retained when the documents were merged. However, this has only been tested on files using the same version of Office. I’m not 100% sure that all formatting will be preserved if you paste a Word 2007 document into Word 2016.
Combine multiple Word documents
To get started, open the first Word document that you want to use as your main file. Then navigate to the location in the document where you want to insert the additional Word file. The advantage of this method is that you can insert additional Word files anywhere in the main file. It doesn’t always have to be at the end.
Now click on the “Insert” tab and select “Object”.
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Now select the documents you want to insert. You can do this one at a time, or select multiple documents at once by holding down the SHIFT key and selecting them.
If you have a specific order in which they should be inserted, do it one at a time. I don’t quite understand how Word determines which files to insert when you select multiple files at a time.
As you can see in the example above, the text from the second Word document starts exactly where I had the cursor, that is, at the end of the first document. All formatting for the second document remains, including bold, bullets, line spacing, text colors, text size, etc.
I even tested a document that only had images and other elements like WordArt, charts, etc., and all of those elements were combined correctly as well. Again, you may run into problems if you merge documents created using different versions of Office. In such a case, it is best to open the old files in a newer version of Word and save them in the new format.
Also check out my other posts on how to combine multiple text files and how to combine multiple Powerpoint presentations. Enjoy!
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