Merge Documents in Microsoft Word

Need to combine a bunch of random documents on your computer into one super-document? Want to incorporate the latest revisions to the original on your computer without a lot of tedious copying and pasting? Microsoft Office can combine and merge documents so that you can easily manage your document library and revisions. Follow this guide to learn how.

Steps

Merging Two Versions of a Document

1. Open Word. You don’t need to open the file that you are trying to merge, just Word itself. This method works for Word 2003, 2007, 2010, 2011 (Mac), and 2013. You will be adding the changes from the second document to the initial document. These will appear as Track Changes in the first document.
2. Click the Review tab. This is located towards the end of the menu bar. Click on the Compare button and then select Combine.
   • In Word 2003 and 2011 (Mac), click the Tools menu and select “Merge Documents” or “Compare and Merge Documents”.
3. Select your documents. Click the dropdown menu under “Original document” and select “Browse”. Navigate to the document on your computer and select it.
   • Do the same in the second dropdown menu for the document with revisions.
4. Click the “More >>” button. This will show more detailed options for the merge. You can choose which formatting you want to keep, and whether the changes should show in the original file, the revised file, or a new file (default).
5. Click OK to merge the documents. The result will be displayed in whichever file you designated in the previous step. All changes to the original will be shown in the Edit-a-Document-Using-Microsoft-Word's-Track-Changes-Feature format.
6. Accept the changes. If you don’t need to review the changes and just want to accept the new revision as complete, click the arrow underneath the Accept button in the Review tab. Then select “Accept All Changes in Document”. All of the marked changes will be accepted and appear as final.

Combining Two Different Documents

1. Open the first document in Word. This method will add the contents of a second document into the body of the first document. No text or changes are compared, the text is simply added to the existing text.
   • This method works for all versions of Word.
2. Place your cursor where you want the new text to appear. When you insert the text from the second document, it is inserted wherever the cursor is located in the document.
3. Click the Insert tab. In the Text section, click the arrow next to the Object button. Select “Text from File” from the menu that appears.
   • In Word 2003 and 2011 (Mac), click the Insert menu and select “File…”
4. Choose the file(s) you want to insert. Browse your computer for the file that you want to insert. You can insert multiple files at once by holding down the Ctrl button and clicking the files that you want to add. The files will be added in the order that you Ctrl+click them.
   • If you have multiple files that appear in an unbroken series, select the whole series by holding down the "Shift" key, click the first file in the series, and then click the last file. The whole series should be selected.
5. Click Open when you are finished selecting your files. The text will appear in your document. Formatting is not always preserved when text is transferred from one document to another, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t look exactly the same.

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