Master Document - Combining multiple large sub-documents in Office 2013

No reply received after one week! I was hoping to hear something from Microsoft themselves but no.

So it would appear that there is no Microsoft solution to this problem and no work-around from the Community.

For the information of those who may have the same problem, I have found a very satisfactory non-Microsoft alternative approach. I downloaded Adobe Acrobat - expensive but it does all that the WORD Master Document code is supposed to achieve but doesn't - and a great deal more - smoothly, professionally and effortlessly. I now have a single PDF file containing ALL the contents of the eight WORD documents, all indexed and sequentially page-numbered as a single document. 

Disappointed that WORD couldn't do the job, but relieved to have found a solution to the problem.

Ron in France

The master document feature in Word isn't reliable (see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/general/RecoverMasterDocs.htm) so combining your separate documents into one is the best solution. Converting to PDF is one way but usually you can make use of a single document in Word format. Or you can use INCLUDETEXT fields.

A side-note: Microsoft doesn't reply to questions here, only your fellow users.

Ron

Glad you got a solution.

If you are willing to play around with this still for the sake of intellectual curiosity, I would like you to test a tool I have been working on. Mail me on trueinsightDOTconsultingATgmailDOTcom if you're interested.

Thanks Stefan, that's most helpful.

If I had seen that document before, I would never have attempted to use Master Document!  

> but usually you can make use of a single document in Word format.

That's what I tried to do to start with but it seems that my composite document (at something over 900MB) was just too big for WORD to handle. It either hung or gave me error messages, as mentioned in my original post.

Anyway with Acrobat Pro I managed to produce a very satisfactory single PDF file. Interesting to note that Acrobat provides the option to convert"a PDF file to a WORD file, so I think I shall give that a try to see whether WORD can then handle the resulting document . I'll report back to the Community on the result!

Best regards

Ron

Thanks Jacques. I'll get back to you directly.

Ron

FOR INFORMATION ... I asked Acrobat Pro to generate a WORD document from my composite PDF file (now nearly 300 pages with hundreds of embedded photos and images) and this it did: I then opened the WORD document with MS WORD (Office 2013) and it opened perfectly and everything seems exactly the same as it did in the PDF document. Now the odd thing is that the resulting size of the WORD document so produced is 50,454 KB whereas the sum total of all eight WORD documents that were input to the PDF file which in turn produced this composite WORD document was over 900,000 KB. Could it be that the answer lies in the photos and images being resized by Adobe Acrobat during the original conversion? I must say the resolution of the finished printed images seems to be equivalent.

Ron in France