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How do I merge 20 separate Word documents into one file?

Anonymous
2011-08-17T21:34:53+00:00

I have 20 chapters of a book in separate Word for Mac files which I transferred to my desktop from old PC.  I tried "drag & drop" on the first 6 chapters and it worked, but when I tried dragging further documents together, they do not merge and do not continue the paging from previous documents.

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-08-19T16:09:29+00:00

    I found out by experimenting that I can open the first chapter, go to its last page and then at the end click Insert, file and the file name for the next chapter and then insert subsequent chapters at the end of the previous chapters.   Still don't know why the click & drag do no work as the chapters all have the same style, page orientation, headers & footers.

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-08-19T16:24:55+00:00

    In Word it's always best to avoid drag and drop. Even when it works it can on occassion lead to corruption issues in the document, especially if you're using some of the advanced Word features ... Tracked Changes being one that comes to mind.

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-08-18T20:27:36+00:00

    So please describe your chapters.

    1. Do they all have the same type of header and footer? I guess not.
    2. Do pages change from portrait to landscape?
    3. Do they all have the same style, or one is in Arial, the other in Times New Roman?

    Let me know and I'll try to help you along.

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-08-18T16:02:50+00:00

    I need to merge the chapters because one file is required by book publishers.  I would save the file to an external drive.  Tried the click and drag and insert and paste without any luck in merging the files.   Tried using the first chapter as a master document and lost all photo inserts.  Hate to think of having to re-insert the illustrations in all 20 chapters again.   Hate the Word for Mac program, but have not found WordPerfect for Mac.

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-08-18T02:48:24+00:00

    Why would you want to merge them? So you can loose them all at once if the resulting single file becomes corrupt? Yes, combining them will let you do global changes, but would your work method otherwise change that much if you opened several document windows?

    You can insert them as you did or through cut and paste. However, if there is a change in the pagination sequence, you need to insert a Section Break, and then unlink the headers and/or footers between the two sections. Read about sections here.

    Another option is to leave them separate but "virtually combine" them through the Master Document feature. Searching for "Master document" in Word's Help yields no relevant results, so here is a nice tutorial from the Office Watch guys. Although it's Windows-oriented, it's hard to get lost. Pay attention to the "Don't be afraid…" subtitle at the top.

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