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Back in 2005 I finished my Masters thesis. For that thesis, each chapter was it's own file. The master document was essentially an outline where each chapter was a link to an external Word file.

With all the data and equations in each chapter this was an absolute life saver. I could work on a chapter without the 15 min loading and the constant bogging down of having to re-paginate every time I typed 3 words.

Anytime I wanted to see the whole doc at once I could load up the master doc. Obviously, I had to do this for the final draft.

That was then, 12 yrs later I don't remember how I did it and it probably wouldn't matter if I could given the UI changes since then.

All my Googling led to people suggesting that you insert Object as Text... But then the formatting gets screwed up. I haven't yet tested it but it appears to be static rather than a link.

Does anyone know how to do this in Word today?

Gabe Spradlin
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1 Answers1

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To access the Master Document functionality, on the View tab, in the Views group, click Outline. You're taken to a new tab that's named Outlining. In the Master Document group, click Show Document. You can then click Insert to insert subdocuments into the current document, which then becomes the master document.

You can also use Object > Insert as Text in the Text group on the Insert tab. The trick is that, after you select a file to insert, you have to click the arrow on the right side of the Insert button and then click Insert as Link. Otherwise, as you noted, the subdocument is inserted as static text.

cnread
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