Combining separate Word documents into one document

[Phrank]

Hi,

I'm trying to find a way to easily combine several (many) MS Word
(2003) documents into a single document. The catch is that I need to
be able to maintain the original formatting of each individual
document in the main document. I have many wide and varied formats
(portrait, landscape, varied margins and styles, etc.), so simply
combining them doesn't work. Normally, we convert the documents to
PDF and then combine them, which is much easier, but we have a client
that wants a combined Word version of this document. Any suggestions
would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Frank

 

[Terry Farrell]

Download boiler.zip from Graham Mayor's site. This utility/macro lets you
chose which files you want to combine. Chose the option the add new
documents following a section break, next page which should enable you to
insert each document and keep its format. However, I am unsure how it will
handle portrait/landscape combinations, but give it a test.

 

[Phrank]

Hi Terry,

We do already extensively use this awesome utility; however, as you
noted, it doesn't handle the portrait/landscape combinations well. I
understand that MS Word is just not designed for something like this,
but when one is trying to be responsive to customers' requests, one
looks in every nook and crany to find a solution - especially in these
economic times. I'll look deeper into the boiler macro to see if we
can do something. Thanks Terry.

Frank

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP on news.microsoft.com]

It would be a simple matter to come up with a macro that can handle the
variations that you mention. It probably just requires the insertion of a
Next Page Section Break at the end of the each inserted document before the
next one is inserted after it.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[Graham Mayor]

The boiler.dot macro does indeed insert a next page section break between
documents (if the option on the userform is checked), but there are limits
to what Word can do in a single document with disparate documents based on a
variety of templates.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Terry Farrell]

You will also find that printers don't handle portrait/landscape on a single
sheet of paper when duplex printing. So combining even manually when
documents are mixed orientation is always going to be a problem.

Terry Farrell

 

[Phrank]

Thanks everyone for the input. It's pretty much as I thought, that we
would use the Boiler macro and then have to go back and fix what
didn't combine appropriately. The Boiler macro at least gets us a lot
closer. Thanks again.

Frank