Making One Document from Many in Microsoft Word

April 7, 2005 10:52 AM

I have 100 separate documents in MS Word which have to be turned into one document for various reasons. How can I do this?
posted by chaz to computers & internet (13 answers total)

see here for possibly useful discussion mentioning word's master document feature.
posted by andrew cooke at 11:01 AM on April 7, 2005

Tape?

Sorry. Does this INCLUDETEXT function help? It looks promising if you could automate it somehow...are your docs named sequentially?
posted by jikel_morten at 11:01 AM on April 7, 2005

oh, sorry, got confused. that might not be very helpful, unless "master document" alone is enough to find the right thing on google/word help.
posted by andrew cooke at 11:03 AM on April 7, 2005

Andrew beat me to it.

Yep, the Master Document (I say it in an ominous voice) is what you want.
posted by ontic at 11:03 AM on April 7, 2005

(ahem) NO! Please do not use Word's Master Document Feature. I will quote the Word MVP Site "A master document has only two possible states: Corrupt, or just about to become Corrupt."
This is the most broken "feature" in all of Word. For the love of all that is useful - don't go there.
A little more info would be helpful - how long are these documents? Do you have access to Adobe Acrobat? (not the Reader, the full meal deal) With a good template, you can create stable documents that are over 500 pages long. Word does choke at about 700 pages or so, but Adobe has some useful features.
Good luck
posted by dbmcd at 12:28 PM on April 7, 2005 [1 favorite]

Try going to Insert->File and select the .doc files (maybe not all 100 simultaneously). I Just tried it with five doc files, it concatenated them all successfully.
posted by Boobus Tuber at 1:10 PM on April 7, 2005

If they can be converted to .txt, then dos can concatenate quite nicely

copy *.txt targetfile.txt
posted by jbradley at 2:33 PM on April 7, 2005

I use Acrobat 6 Pro. This may only work if you use the same version.

1. Create a PDF from multiple files (your 100-or-so docs).
2. Export to Word.

Done!
posted by SlyBevel at 5:00 PM on April 7, 2005

Sub ConcatenateAllWordFiles()

With Application.FileSearch
.NewSearch
.LookIn = "C:\Test" 'Set this to your directory full of files.
.SearchSubFolders = True 'Set this to false if you don't want subfolders included
.Execute

For i = 1 To .FoundFiles.Count

If Right(.FoundFiles(i), 4) = ".doc" Then


Documents.Open FileName:=.FoundFiles(i), _
ConfirmConversions:=False, ReadOnly:=False, AddToRecentFiles:=False, _
PasswordDocument:="", PasswordTemplate:="", Revert:=False, _
WritePasswordDocument:="", WritePasswordTemplate:="", Format:= _
wdOpenFormatAuto

current = ActiveDocument.Name
Selection.WholeStory
Selection.Copy
Documents(current).Close
Selection.Paste
Selection.EndKey Unit:=wdLine
End If

Next i

End With

End Sub
posted by pompomtom at 5:33 PM on April 7, 2005

It's ugly, but it work. (well, on windows it does...)
posted by pompomtom at 5:34 PM on April 7, 2005

Heh. Mine's easier. And no mucking about with a command line. On the other hand, mine's more expensive.
posted by SlyBevel at 5:41 PM on April 7, 2005

No command line about it. That's just a word macro.
posted by pompomtom at 6:52 PM on April 7, 2005 [1 favorite]

Wow. U 0wnz teh m4cr0, d00d.

I didn't even think of that.
posted by SlyBevel at 7:26 PM on April 7, 2005