Combine documents same style names (Word 2003)

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I have a user with 3 different and very long documents. Each document was carefully formatted using common styles such as Heading 1, 2, 3, Body Text, Body Text indent. There are many common style names across all of the documents, however, these styles do not look the same. Now there is the ‘need’ to combine the three documents into one document, and each section needs to look as it did orginally.

HELP! Is there a way to do this?

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Wouldn’t it be better to format the combined document consistently? Having three different “Heading 1” styles in one document etc. is not a very attractive idea…

If you prefer to keep the inconsistent formatting, the easiest way is *not* to combine the documents.

If you do want to combine them *and* keep the inconsistent formatting, you’ll have to create new styles in two of the three documents that look like the existing styles but have unique names, then use Edit | Replace to replace the old styles with the new ones. This is the only way to keep the formatting when you copy the contents of these two documents into the third one.

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In MY opinion, it would be better to have all the headings, etc look the same. And yes, I would like to keep these as separate documents. I have even suggested PDFing the documents and then combining them. But the user wants us to combine them as they look.

You suggestion is the only thing I had come up with also, But the user was hoping for an easier way – the magic button.

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I’m afraid there is no ‘magic button’ for this because it goes against the grain of what a word processor is intended to do.

(Cf. the recent thread starting at post 701,613 where we came to the same conclusion)

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I don’t know of a way other than what you are doing. –I sometimes have to do this when already published legal documents must be inserted into a larger doc.–

The process is pretty systematic. But for me it doesn’t happen often enough for me to try writing a macro (or macros) to do this. If you do it often enough, you might consider it.

Pam

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I work at a law firm and we encounter this very problem when combining client documents with our stylized version of the same document. My most recent solution has been to re-create styles in one document with completely unique names and, most importantly, each styles is based on “no style” –not Normal. Using this method, I never have to worry about distorted or unexpected formatting.

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