Combining four Word files into one document

[Guest]

I have four Word documents (let's call them chapters) that I need to combine
into one comprehensive document. They all have their own formatting,
including complex headers and footers. I've tried copying and pasting and
"insert a file". It keeps messing up the formatting, changing font sizes,
turns capital letters into lower case, changes the font to a new font, not to
mention not retaining my headers/footers.
I'm planning on converting them all to PDF and making one large document
there, but I need to have the one large document available in Word format as
well (for future editing, this is a draft). It's also impossible to convert
it all to a PDF and then back into a Word document because I have a lot of
graphics/tables involved that get lost in translation.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Nikki:

I would create a template that defines the styles allowed in the target
document. Then I'd attach that template to the chapter documents, convert
each style in the chapter to one of the styles in your template, and resolve
any format issues. Then you can combine the documents in a more controlled
fashion.

You'll still have to deal with section breaks, headers and footers, and the
like.

Bear