Saving the "content" of Master Document as a Separate Document

May 18, 2014 10:15 PM

I've arranged all the chapters in my dissertation into a master document, with pretty formatting and page numbers and everything. Now, how do I get that into a SEPARATE WORD DOCUMENT with all of the content of the subdocuments, but not linked to the subdocuments, so I can send it out as one nice Word file to my committee members? I'm using Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows.

posted by dhens to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

When I used to be into Microsoft Word and read the MVP fora, this was the sort of thing that made people wince and put their hands over their ears while they waited for the explosion. Please back up everything individually multiple times.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:05 AM on May 19, 2014

Does it *need* to be sent out as a nice Word file to your committee members? As opposed to, say, a nice PDF file?
posted by Sequence at 3:07 AM on May 19, 2014

This was the point in the diss process at which I almost lost my mind. I agree with the above - I would back up a copy, and then try moving each chapter to PDF. Unless you want to reformat anything? - Hopefully you don't want to do that, though.
posted by carter at 3:26 AM on May 19, 2014

Yes, send it out as PDF if at all possible. Sending out a large, very complicated Word 2007 document to committee members who may not all be running the same version of Word is itself potentially quite problematic, irrespective of the difficulty involved in generating such a beast to begin with using Word. Adobe Acrobat can join multiple sub-PDFs into one large document. Suggest you generate the PDFs from Word, then use Acrobat to join them together.
posted by killdevil at 6:02 AM on May 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ugh, sympathies. If you need it in Word (and I always did for the track changes function for my committee/reviewers), is it possible to copy and paste as text? That will remove all formatting but also all links and fields. If that doesn't work, save into a text document and then copy and paste. Then you have to reformat to put back in italics and bold and remove weird field errors.

Sorry, not an elegant solution. When doing my dissertation I learned from my MSc thesis and avoided all the fancy Word formatting including table of content, labelled figures, and lit cited. Too hard to control. I ended up using a Latex template put out by my school to submit the final document and let my reviewers edit a barebones version.
posted by hydrobatidae at 6:03 AM on May 19, 2014

Best answer: If I'm remembering this right, go into outline view, select the show document button, and then check unlink. Repeat for each sub-document.
posted by three_red_balloons at 6:39 AM on May 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I did end up submitting it as a PDF. I had wanted a Word file so that people could edit it. I gave my adviser a copy of all the individual parts of the diss as Word files, as she will have by far the most comments to make.
posted by dhens at 8:39 AM on May 19, 2014

Yeah, sorry, I did all the editing stuff with my supervisor using single word documents for each chapter, then in the last couple of weeks, I merged the files together.

Mine went off without a single hitch. In fact, I'd left a week and I did it within an hour and a half including the bibliography, and that included 25 minutes to generate the pdf.
posted by kadia_a at 12:30 PM on May 19, 2014

Response by poster: Yeah, sorry, I did all the editing stuff with my supervisor using single word documents for each chapter, then in the last couple of weeks, I merged the files together.

How did you do this?
posted by dhens at 6:50 AM on May 20, 2014

Response by poster: Just FYI, three_red_balloons's way worked. (I know because one of my committee members specifically asked for a Word version to mark up, so I had to try.)
posted by dhens at 12:17 PM on May 20, 2014