Several of our consulting projects have had a similar need: programatically merge multiple Word documents into a single Word file. Using SoftArtisans’ WordWriter, this task is fairly easy. In this article, I’ll show you how. If you’re not a current WordWriter user, you can download a free evaluation and follow along!

When you use WordWriter to merge documents, the page setup of the destination document you are merging into is used for all pages. (This follows the same behavior as Word.) If you create a new document to merge into, you’re resulting document will have default formatting.

If you want to preserve the formatting of each document that you are merging, insert a section break in your final output file before merging each document. You will then need to copy the formatting information from each document to the section you just created. Some types of document formatting that you may want to preserve include: margins; paper size or orientation; page borders; vertical alignment; and number of columns. (Text formatting, such as font, font size, text color are preserved, so you don’t need to manually set these.) Continue reading Using WordWriter to merge Word Documents →