merging multiple documents without losing formatting

[Aaron...]

This is my first post, so thanks in advance for your help...

Firstly, I'm using word 2007.

I have in excess of 40 documents to merge into one, and create a table of
contents.

each of the original documents has different formatting, orientations and
margins. to make things more difficult some use different font styles. the
numbering on the font styles has been removed on the original files but when
I "insert" "text from file" I lose the original formatting and the numbering
on the font styles re-appears on the new document.

the inserted text (and tables) now spill over to the next page, even though
they did not on the original document.

so, two things:
how do I merge many documents and keep their formatting?
how do I easily remove the numbers in front of text that has had a style
attributed to it?

Thanks for your help.......

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

(1) Are the original files Word documents? If so, what do you mean by
"numbering on the font styles"?

Word has "Paragraph styles" and "Character styles," and every iota of
text has some Paragraph style attached to it, and these can't be
"removed."

So you might need to first convert each original file to a Word file?

(2) You can't have Paragraph styles with the _same name_ and
_different formatting properties_ in different original files, because
any one Paragraph style can have only one set of properties in an
entire document. So if various original files have, say, a Normal
paragraph, but Normal is formatted diffferently in various original
files, you'll need to rename all those styles to different names
(something as simple as Normal1, Normal2, etc., would do).

(3) When you're certain there are no style name conflicts between
original files, go to the end of the base document into which you want
to insert the original files and add a Section Break Next Page (Page
Layout tab > Breaks). Then "Insert" "text from file" the first one,
add a Section Break Next Page, and so on through the entire document.

(4) Assuming you want the pagination to continue from beginning to end
through all the sections (which seems desirable since you want a ToC
for the whole thing), if it doesn't, then go to the Header for each
Section in turn, beginning at the beginning, and use the Format Page
Number button to set the page numbering to Continue from Previous
Section.