Concatenating M$-Word files

March 24, 2007 by
Filed under: Uncategorized 

As part of today’s catch-up-with-work task, I’ve now got the information I need but it’s in 53 separate MS-Word (.doc) files and for simplicity’s sake I want them all in one. I’ve not used Master Documents in a long time but my experience ties in with this note from a Microsoft MVP:

A master document has only two possible states: Corrupt, or just about to be corrupt. And that is why we say that the only possible fix to a master document is “don’t use it!”

The link to the new “how to make it work” page is broken but fortunately I found the referenced article here. Mind you, even that contains these reassuring words:

Master documents excel at generating corruption, corruption that is totally hidden and can completely destroy all associated documents.

I feel much better now. :(

Oh well, I’ll backup the source docs and just see how it goes. If it doesn’t work first time then I’ll convert each file to PDF and go from there.

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Comments

6 Comments on Concatenating M$-Word files

  1. Insaniac on Sat, 24th Mar 2007 2:02 pm

    2. I’m fairly certain you can bind all the pdfs into one after you’ve spun them off

  2. paul on Sat, 24th Mar 2007 5:12 pm

    3. Blurgh! Those instructions are from 2002 and the version of Word I have on my work laptop (2003) doesn’t appear to have the same functions. I think I’ve got an older version on my games PC so I’ll check that out.

  3. paul on Sun, 25th Mar 2007 8:07 am

    4. Any idea how? I ended up converting the .DOC files to .PDF last night but I’ve still got 50-odd separate files.

  4. Insaniac on Sun, 25th Mar 2007 10:27 am

    5. You can do it in Adobe Acrobat Professional.

    From the File Menu:

    Click File and select Create PDF and click From Multiple Files…
    In the “Create PDF from Multiple Documents” window, click Browse and select the files you want to combine

    You have options to arrange the articles as you see fit. If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat Professional, you can send me the files and I can do it for you

  5. paul on Sun, 25th Mar 2007 10:50 am

    6. I’ve only got Acrobat 5 (and the latest (v8?) reader) so that’s probably why I can’t see how to do this.
    Not to worry; I can just use Windows Explorer to select all the files and then right-click and Print.

  6. paul on Sun, 25th Mar 2007 7:30 pm

    7. It took me long enough to clue in, but I finally realised by work laptop has Acrobat v7 on it, so I *can* concatenate the PDFs. D’oh!

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