How to Combine Documents in Word | Keep or Merge Formats | Export to PDF | Link / Update Documents

so you want to be able to combine multiple word documents into one word document we'll look at a few scenarios here the first scenario is where you want to keep the source formatting when you merge the files together the second method is where you want to merge the documents but to have consistent formatting so the same formatting throughout the document and i'll also look at how to merge the documents and then export to pdf so first scenario is we have three documents with very different formatting chapter one we've got blue text there chapter two we've got green text chapter three we've got orange text so we want to retain the formats in these documents when we do the merge so what i'm going to do is merge to a new document you could use the same method for merging into one of the existing documents so i'm going to start off by creating a new document file new and then i'm going to go to the chapter one document so i'll go to view switch windows chapter one i'm gonna select all the text in the document that's ctrl a and then ctrl c to copy switch back to my new document and i'm going to paste in using control v now it looks like it does a pretty good job but actually the chapter 1 heading was blue in my chapter one document when i've pasted it in it's now black so we'll actually undo my paste control zed i'm going to use a slightly different method to paste in what i'm going to do is go to home paste and then there's this option here keep source formatting you can see now that chapter 1 heading is blue right now i'm going to position my cursor at the bottom of this document where i want to paste the next document and i'll go to view switch window chapter 2 control a control c then i'm going to switch back to my new document and if i just do a normal paste ctrl v you can see it doesn't very successfully paste in the format for this document so i'm going to do the same trick pasting it in keeping the source formatting now another way of pasting in the source formatting is that once you've done a normal paste you should have this paste options button that appears at the bottom of your paste area and here you can choose to keep source formatting so you can do that after you've done a normal paste so now we've got the chapter 1 document blue chapter 2 document in green so all we need now is the chapter 3 document so we go back to switch windows chapter 3 control a ctrl c back to our new document and then we'll just paste it in so you can use either of the methods i've shown you i'm going to go to home paste keep source formatting so this method is great if you want to keep the source formatting from the original files in your new combined document now if you want to have consistent formatting throughout your document so the same formatting on all chapters you can use a completely different method which is slightly quicker to use so i'm going to close down this document i'm going to save it and i'll create a new blank document the file blank document and this time what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to insert and then over to the object button in the text group i'm going to click on the little drop down there and then go to text from file now what you need to do is to navigate to the folder that you're storing these documents in so here are my documents and what i would do is i'd select them all so i'd click on the first one shift click on the last one they'll then be selected and i click on insert and they come into the document with consistent formatting now the formatting that has been applied has been applied via styles so for example in all the documents that i've imported all the headings have the heading 1 style applied and all the normal text has the normal style applied so what i could do if i fancy changing the look of the chapter headings i click into one of the chapter headings right click on the heading 1 style up here go to modify for example i'll just changed the color to green and now you'll see that all of the chapter headings have that green format another little tip for you by the way if you want your chapter headings to always start on a new page you right click on heading one there go to modify go to format paragraph line and page breaks page break before click on ok and then on okay and then your chapter headings will always start on a new page i'll just close this file down and i'll create another new document and i just want to show you what happens if the files in the folder that you're importing from are not in the correct order so if i go to insert objects text from files here in this alphabetical folder i've got the chapters but they're for some reason named in such a way that they're not in the correct order so by default these are sorted alphabetically i could also sort them in descending order alphabetically but the problem is is if i select these files and insert you'll see that chapter three ends up at the top of the document it's literally imported them alphabetically so you want to think maybe about the naming conventions that you're using in your documents because they will come in either in ascending or descending order alphabetically now we'll show you a way of getting around that actually if we go back here text from file now if i select these three files you'll notice that down here is listed them what i can do is manually change the order down here so b chapter one then c chapter two it's a bit fiddly but you can do it and a chapter 3. so if i now click on insert it does insert them in the correct order chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter three i'll close this down and i want to show you how to import or merge the documents but get them to automatically update if you change the source documents i'll create another new file and i'm going to use the same method as before we're going to go to insert object text from file and i'll go back to the original chapter documents i've selected all three but what i'm going to do is instead of clicking directly on the insert button i'm going to go to this little drop down and insert as a link now it doesn't look as though there's any difference here to the document but if i go back to chapter one and i add some text here and then in this document the merge document i right click into the document and update field you will see that it's brought through the additional text and you'll see that if i click into the document you get this gray background because all this content is now a field within this merge document if you don't like that gray background i'll show you how to turn it off you can go to file options advanced scroll down to show document content field shading you need to change that to never click on ok and it will get rid of that gray shading behind your field okay so the last thing to show you is how to export this merge document into a pdf well it's already merged we've already done the hardest part all we've got to do is go to file export create pdf so i'll call this merged document and i'll click on publish if i go back to that folder there's the pdf let's double click on it here is my merge document with the content of all three chapters okay that's all i wanted to cover in this particular video hopefully that's useful if it is please give me a thumbs up and subscribe and i'll see you next video [Music]

Channel: Chester Tugwell

Views: 78,781

Keywords: combine word documents into one pdf, merge docx, how to merge word documents, how to merge word documents and keep formatting, unable to combine documents in word, how to combine documents in word, combine two documents in word, how to combine two documents in word with different formats, merge word documents online without losing formatting

Id: EmSW2KsFp40

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022