Sometimes Microsoft Word users need to join several Word documents into a single file, without loss of formatting.<\/p>\n
An example would be a cover letter, a quote, and a contract.<\/p>\n
Or a proposal or contract, plus appendices.<\/p>\n
(In legal industry parlance the finalised collection of documents\u00a0is called\u00a0a “closing binder”, “electronic bundle” or less commonly, a deal bible. \u00a0And its usually in\u00a0PDF…)<\/p>\n
Word itself doesn’t do this for you. \u00a0So this blog post is a review of\u00a0tools you might\u00a0download\/install to try to\u00a0get the job done.<\/p>\n
TLDR: I don’t want to be negative, but bottom line is they won’t help … the 5 tools I found and tested each do a poor job at this. \u00a0If you, dear reader, know of a better tool, please share in a comment! \u00a0 Most people seem to convert their documents to PDF first, then merge the PDFs – for good reason!<\/p>\n
By way of background\/disclosure, our\u00a0Docx4j Enterprise product is good at this (if I may say so myself), but\u00a0we don’t sell it to end users. \u00a0This background\u00a0allowed me to make a couple of very simple documents to test the products.<\/p>\n
Without further ado, the 5 products I tested were:<\/p>\n
My first test was to merge 2 documents which define Heading 1 differently. \u00a0Does the merged document keep the distinct appearance of the 2 headings?<\/p>\n
The only product which was able to pass\u00a0this basic test was Icestand’s.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately Icestand failed my second test: it lost section formatting (page orientation, headers\/footers).<\/p>\n
And my third test: list numbering. \u00a0If doc 1 contains “1,2,3” and so does doc 2, in the merged output, do you get “1,2,3 \u00a01,2,3” or “1,2,3 4,5,6”?<\/p>\n
Since all the others failed test 1, I didn’t subject them to tests 2 or 3.\u00a0 But I found:<\/p>\n
Since these products all lose formatting, unless there’s a better product out there somewhere, you’d get better results by converting to PDF, then merging the PDF files. \u00a0 In this respect,\u00a0bundledocs<\/a>,\u00a0CaseLines<\/a>\u00a0and others\u00a0look interesting; they do\u00a0the PDF conversion as well, removing a step from the process.<\/p>\n