If you work with Word documents often, there has probably come a time when you had to merge multiple Word documents into one master file. Unfortunately, Word does not have a simple Import/Export function to combine multiple documents into one.

Instead to merge Word documents, you have to go to the Insert tab.

insert tab word 2007

Now find the Object drop-down and click on the small arrow to the right of it. You’ll get an option for Object and Text from File. Choose the latter.

insert text from file

Now you can go ahead and select as many Word documents that you want to combine into the current document. You can press the Ctrl key or Shift key to select more than one file.

Note that the top file that you select will be merged first, so if there is an order that you want to maintain, make sure to rename the files first so that the appear in order in the dialog box.

combine multiple word documents

Now just click Insert and all of the documents will be combined into a single doc file. You can also click on the small arrow next to Insert and choose Insert as Link if you want it to simply point to the other documents instead of being incorporated.

Note that when you merge Word documents, the formatting does not always remain. It’s very annoying, but there’s not much that can be done other than manually fixing it or copying and pasting the improperly formatted sections in.

Also, check out my other posts on how to combine multiple text files, how to merge multiple Powerpoint presentations, and how to merge multiple PDF files. Enjoy!