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Microsoft Word is the popular word processing tool used primarily to create, edit and save the documents for any kind of business. Apart from creating just files, one of the most important advantages of using Microsoft Word is that you can easily analyze the feedback for the documents from multiple reviewers and rewrite them by combining multiple documents sent for a review into one.
Why combine multiple Word documents into one?
There may be times when you may have to send your documents to your editors or team members for a quick review, feedback and suggestions. After a review, you receive a handful of feedback and revision copies in the form of word outlining a number of edits and changes from a lot of reviewers. A simple copy and paste will consume enormous time if you want to combine reviews and changes from multiple copies. With so many copies of changes and edits from multiple authors or reviewers, it is quite possible that things can go weary.
To make sure that you don't miss out on any important feedback and revisions, you may find it useful to combine all the Word documents containing feedback from multiple authors into a single original document. That being said, combining feedback from multiple reviewers into a single word document will let you label the changes made by specific reviewers. This way it will ease out your work to review comments and make necessary changes.
In this article, we explain how to easily merge multiple documents in Microsoft Word.
Merge two Word documents into one
Launch Microsoft Word and open your original document which you sent for review.
In the toolbar, navigate to Review tab and click Compare.
Select the option Combine from the drop-down menu. This will pop up a secondary window that allows you to choose the two documents which you want to combine.
Under the option Original document, select the primary document which you have sent for suggestions and reviews. Make sure that you select the original documents that you have worked on which do not contain any edits and modifications from reviewers.
In the Label unmarked changes with box, type original or any phrase to know that this is the original document which was sent for review.
Under the Revised document, choose a reviewed document which you want to combine.
In the Label unmarked changes with box, write the name of the author to know who suggested the modifications.
Click More and under Show Changes in option, select the New document.
Click OK.
The Word now opens a new document that will display both your original document which you sent for review and the copy from the author which you merged. The word divides the screen into three sections with a combined document displayed at the center, revisions outlined to the left of the screen and, displays both original and revised documents simultaneously split into two in the third section.
If you find this information very confusing, you can bring down the sections to two to make the visuals more appealing. Follow the below steps to minimize the display in the toolbar.
Navigate to Compare.
Click Show source Documents and select Hide Source Documents.
Once you have included all the changes the way you want, Save the document.
Combine additional Word copies
If you want to combine more copies from a different reviewer, repeat the same steps as mentioned above. However now to merge additional copies you need to use the revised documents which you got from merging the two documents in the above and add secondary documents into the revised word file. Follow the below steps to merge the additional copies
In the toolbar, navigate to Review tab and click Compare.
Under the option Original document, select the revised document that contains the combined changes
In the Label unmarked changes box, type any phrase to know that this is a revised document that contains the combined changes.
Under the Revised document, choose any document which you want to combine.
In the Label unmarked changes box, write the name of the author to know who suggested the modifications.
Click More and under Show Changes in option, select the New document.
Click OK.
Word opens a new document that will display both your revised document that contains combined changes and the secondary reviewed document from the author which you merged.
Once you have included all the changes the way you want, Save the document.
The above-mentioned procedure works well with Microsoft Word for Office 365, Word 2019, Word 2016, Word 2013, Word 2010 and Word 2007.
Wrapping up
Merging documents is extremely useful if you have got too many edits during the review process. For a document with huge content, adding too many changes will be time-consuming. In such a scenario, it is quite helpful to merge documents in Word. However, If your content is not very large and if you find the above steps overwhelming, you can simply copy the text that you want to include in the document and past them directly into your new documents.
