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Do you create really long documents in Word?
If so, you probably know that Word doesn’t always play well with them.
It’s usually smarter to split your long documents into multiple Word files.
That’s where Word’s master document feature can help.
It allows you to combine multiple Word files into a single Word file.
The content of the subdocuments is not inserted into the master document.
The master document only contains links to the subdocuments.
This allows you to edit the subdocuments separately.
Any changes made to subdocuments are incorporated into the master document automatically.
We also show you how to easily add a table of contents to the beginning of the master document.
More options become available in the Master Document section of the Outlining tab.
snag the entire outline in the document and click Create.
Clicking Create encloses each document in its own box.
Save the master document file again at this point.
Each box in the master document becomes a separate file, as shown below.
tap the Table of Contents drop-down button in the Table of Contents section.
Select one of the Automatic Table options to insert an automatically generated table of contents at the insertion point.
Word displays the section breaks and what types they are.
This means there are no page breaks in your document.
you’ve got the option to easilychange the throw in of each section break.
The following image shows how your document looks in outline mode with the subdocuments showing expanded.
smack the View tab and then click Outline in the Document Views section.
The Outlining tab becomes available and active.
Click Show Document in the Master Document section to activate additional options.
To add a subdocument to the master document, click Insert.
On the Insert Subdocument dialog box, navigate to the location of the documents you want to insert.
pick the first file and click Open.
This keeps all the styles in the subdocument consistent with the styles in the master document.
Repeat the steps for inserting subdocuments for each of the documents you want to include in your master document.
When you are finished, you’ve got the option to collapse the subdocuments, if desired.
To do this, click Collapse Subdocuments in the Master Document section of the Outlining tab.
Click OK to save the document.
Notice that the full path to each of your subdocument files display in each subdocument box.
Again, you caneasily change the jot down of each section break, if needed.
Master documents in earlier versions of Word sometimes corrupted the documents.
You may encounter this problem in Word 2010.
See theMicrosoft Answers sitefor more information.
