How to combine Word documents?

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After combing in use it with Date Modified, in last 2 minutes.

Firstly Word 2008 is ancient and no longer supported. Being so old it could be that it will prevent doing some of these steps. Word 2013 and Word 2017 have never existing on the Mac - only Windows. The current version is Word 2019. Word 2016 for Mac is the oldest still supported by Microsoft version.

Second I am presuming you may have seen this prior Apple discussion post - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5169694

Third, there are several things you could be referring to.

1. I don't think this one will apply but you could be referring to 'mail merge' this is where you have a single copy of say a 'letter' and want it to do a 'mail merge' whereby it inserts addresses for different people - one per copy of the letter
2. It has been possible in previous Word versions for Mac to have a very long document by having multiple linked short documents, this might typically be used when you are writing a long book or similar (hundreds of pages) long document. Trying to have a single document of this length results in performance problems and increased chances of crashes. This approach involves having a master document with multiple sub-documents, the page numbers are kept in order and sync between these documents. See - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/master-document-capabilities-lost-in-word-for-mac/aa07b753-92c7-4c33-b80c-20c4d5caba0b
3. Literally taking two or more shorter documents and producing a single larger document containing the content of the smaller documents. The simplest but manual approach would be to open each and copy and paste in to a new single document. The Automator approach basically does the same thing but 'automates' this process to some extent. The place the resulting file ends up depends on how you construct the Automator action, it might also ask you as an interactive step where to save to.

Note: It is possible to 'combine' multiple PDF documents in to a single PDF document. Such documents might be from scanning pages. This is nothing to do with Word. It can be done for example by using the Preview app or I am sure by creating a similar Automator action.

Office for Mac has indeed historically been full of lots of serious bugs, I have not used this particular master document feature myself in anger.

I know of at least two bugs finally fixed in Office 2016 which took Microsoft decades to fix. One affected every version of Excel ever written on both Mac and Windows and took 27 years to fix!!!

So it maybe Office 2016 and presumably 2019 might be a step forwards for you. You could sign up for a trail of Office365 to test it. Remember 2016 is the oldest supported version.

Note: Office365 only provides Office 2019 now.

TOC = Table Of Contents

If that is not numbering correctly with a master/sub-document then I would sadly expect things like footnotes, references, index etc. might also have problems.

While not an answer, it explains some of the problems.

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/aad6791b-22c4-4b98-894d-e3ebe11076d1/merging-documents-with-different-headersfooters?forum=worddev

R

Remember even if you take the simple approach of working in a single (large) document it will get slower as it gets longer especially when scrolling but even when typing. There is also the increased likelihood of crashes as I mentioned.

A partial help is to view it in Draft mode rather than Print Layout, however you then don't see the page breaks etc.

Hmmm...

It did for me too, but searching google for it took mr there but shows the same link???

http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php

find any file

I tried the master document approach in word 2011. All I found were lots of bugs. Maybe if someone had lead me by the hand, things would have gone better. In particular, I had trouble with the TOC.

Did you see this?

"I had the same problem as you-- I couldn't see any resulting file. I added the additional action "Save Word Documents" which I found in the same "Documents" section where "Combine Word Documents" was. This now works for me."

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5169694?page=2

R

PS. I wrote a 61 page document in word. I found so many bugs. Centering around TOC, ordered lists -- I'm now doing them manually, indentation, spacing of pictures. The other day, I put in a page eject before a picture. The picture didn't move to the next page.

I looked in word 2011. There is a document insert function Insert > File.... You would write an applescript to do the insert. I may have written one. I'll look around. I would not be too hard to write such a script. Look around the net for applescript merge documents.

First off, there are two ways of combining documents in Word 2011. Which do you choose?

It's hard to believe that Word has so many bugs. I read that Microsoft started a big push to automate testing 15 to twenty years ago. The idea is to create a test collection that when you push a button, the tester will say yes or no. With all the money M$ makes from Office, you would think they could do enough testing. I guess B?lmer felt a quality macOS product would take away from Windows.

R