Normally we will start and finish a job or project or any text in a single Word document, editing the text and the shape, adding images… but this is not always the case and it is likely that you will have to join or merge or combine or join several Word documents. Word in a single final document. In that case, beyond copying and pasting, there are other methods that allow us to have several documents in a single file.
You may have two documents with the same job that you want to merge, for example. Or simply that you have started writing on one and finished on another because you were on another computer. Or because it is a group project and each person does their part, for example. Whatever reason we have for doing this, we can merge Word documents so that the content appears in all of them. We can combine, join or merge two or more Word documents and we will explain how to do it.
Copy and paste, the most basic
The way to combine two documents in Word is to copy and paste one document into another. It is the fastest way, although not the most effective or the one that will give us the best result. We can select the entire document from the top menu… We go to the Word menu bar and look for “Edit”. A menu with options will open and we choose “Select all” to mark all the document that you have open.
All the content will be automatically selected and we will only have to right-click anywhere in the document and choose “copy” or “cut” although we can also use the keyboard shortcut “control+c” to then go to the corresponding document and do control+ v or right-click and paste. We will thus be able to merge the Word document.
It is not the best way to do it or the most efficient, but it is a quick way that will take us a few seconds, although we will not exactly be merging or joining documents, but simply copying and pasting from one to another.
Insert the new document
It should be made clear that this works to combine .DOC or .DOCX documents, but also to add other types of documents such as .TXT, .ODT, .XML, .PDF, .HTML and various other formats. The process is simple, although it may vary depending on the version of Word you have on your computer, but all of them will allow it… The first thing you should do is open a new document in Word. Open the program on your computer and create a white document, from scratch, with which you can test this process until you know how it’s done and then repeat the process with the file you want to combine.
- Go to the Word document
- Go to the top menu of the screen and look for “Insert”
Here we will see a series of options: pages, table, illustrations, complements…
- Find “Text”
- Click the dropdown arrow to open more options
- Choose “Object”, as you see in the screenshot below
- Here you should choose “Insert text from file”
- A window will open in Word, a file explorer window
Once here we will have to look for the document that we want to merge. We can choose one or several files that we are going to join to the original blank Word document. There we will select the ones we want to add and click on Insert. If we click on “Interval” we can only insert certain pages or cells in the case of an Excel document….
It is possible that if we select several documents to combine we will see how Word freezes for a few seconds. This is normal and we just have to wait for those few seconds to pass for the process to complete. This blockage also occurs when we choose non-native Word formats such as PDFs, a process that can take a little longer to complete.
Everything will be displayed as if we joined one after another, copying and pasting. The written texts and the typography used are maintained , but all the images or tables or figures that we had in the original document will also be inserted. In addition, the headers are also kept. If we want to unify the format, we must do it on the final document in the same way that we will do with any other Word document, modifying letters and sizes, fonts, colors.
Combine documents with websites and apps
Another option to combine documents is to use specific websites that allow us to do it, but normally we will not be able to do it if the document is from Word, but rather we will have to first convert the document into a PDF and then use websites that allow us to combine it. First we have to save as a PDF and for this we will go to the top of Word in the document that interests us, tap on “ File ” and choose “Save as…” where we will have to choose the name of the file and we have to choose the format. Among the options we choose “PDF” and it will be saved in this format. When we have both, we will only have to go to a specialized website to join documents and merge them.
We must bear in mind, however, that when merging two PDFs we cannot edit the format except that once we have the third PDF created by joining the first two , we pass it to a Word document again. It is a much slower and more annoying process than the previous one, but you can take it into account if you are looking for an alternative that is also valid to use.
There are many websites that allow us and IlovePDF is one of the most common. We simply have to go to the web page and choose the “join pdf ” option in the menu on the top page. We will see a red button in the center of the screen that will open the browser that allows us to choose the PDF documents that we want to join or merge. Once we have it, we will simply have to wait for the process to complete and unify.
We will get a final PDF that we can download to our computer. As we have explained before, if what we want is to have merged a Word document, we will have to modify this PDF and convert it into an editable document. You just have to go to the top of the web page and choose “convert PDF” and select “PDF to Word”. You choose the file you want to convert, wait for the process and you can download it to your computer.
