PS: If you find you lose your formatting when combining Word documents, read this article for the solution. Now you will have one big document including all of your chapters!Īnd … if you had footnotes in the documents, and had set page numbers to show, they will automatically update in the combined document to be numbered consecutively (if you want start your footnote numbering at 1 for each chapter, you’ll need to look at my posts on footnotes and endnotes).

Note: it doesn’t matter what order you are displaying them in or what order you click them in, it will choose them and insert them in alphabetical or numerical order, as I mentioned above. Once you have them all highlighted, click Insert.

Hold down the Control Key and click on all the ones you want to combine (or click on the top one, hold down Shift and click on the bottom one if you want all of them). Now navigate to your files and select the ones you want to combine. Then, click on the Insert tab and find Object in the Text area:Ĭlick on the arrow to the right of Object to get the drop-down menu, and click on Text from File: OK, so we’ve got, say, four documents or chapters to combine into one.įirst, open a new, blank document (using the Home button, New, and choosing a blank document) The best thing to do is add a number 1, 2, 3, etc at the start of your file names BEFORE YOU START COMBINING, so you know they will come out in the correct order. Then Word will carefully sort them alphabetically into Then that’s fine, they will combine in that order. Word will combine your chapter files in alphanumerical order. The file names must be in the order that the chapters are going to be in. It’s pretty easy to combine several documents into one, however the most important point is … How do I prepare to combine my documents? This is the correct way to do it and actually takes less time and avoids you leaving out any bits of your individual chapters. That can lead to issues and inconsistencies. You might be tempted to pick up the text of each chapter and copy and paste it into one document. What’s the incorrect way to combine my chapters? But the time will come when you want to put it all into one book, with page numbers running throughout, rather than messing around starting the page numbers for chapter 2 at the next number on from chapter 1, etc. Lots of people do their writing a chapter at a time, and have it edited a chapter at a time, too. These instructions work for Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013 I’ve used Word 2010 for the screenshots Why would I want to combine chapters into one document? It’s particularly useful if you’ve written a dissertation, thesis or book and need to combine all of the chapters into one file. This article explains how to combine several Word documents into one document.

Combine comments in word for mac