

NOTE: It might be easier if you store your subdocument files in the same directory as your master document file. On the Insert Subdocument dialog box, navigate to the location of the documents you want to insert. To add a subdocument to the master document, click Insert. Click Show Document in the Master Document section to activate additional options.
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The Outlining tab becomes available and active. To do this, create a new, blank Word document and save it like we mentioned earlier when creating a master document from scratch.Ĭlick the View tab and then click Outline in the Document Views section. If you have some existing documents you want to include in a master document, you can create a new master document file and insert the existing documents as subdocuments. The following image shows how your document looks in outline mode with the subdocuments showing expanded.Ĭreate a Master Document Using Existing Word Files You can easily change the type of each section break. This means there are no page breaks in your document. NOTE: When you create a master document from scratch, Word inserts a continuous section break before and after each subdocument you create. Word displays the section breaks and what types they are. To see the section breaks inserted by Word when you created the subdocuments, click the Home tab and click the paragraph symbol button in the Paragraph section. Select one of the Automatic Table options to insert an automatically generated table of contents at the insertion point. Click the Table of Contents drop-down button in the Table of Contents section. To add a table of contents to your master document, put the cursor at the beginning of the document and click the References tab. To go back to the previous view, such as Print Layout, click Close Outline View in the Close section on the Outlining tab.
How do i link documents in word how to#
We also show you how to easily add a table of contents to the beginning of the master document. In this article, we show you the basics of creating a master document and subdocuments from scratch, and creating a master document from existing subdocuments. If there are multiple people working on a single document, a master document allows you to send different parts of the document to different people to work on. Any changes made to subdocuments are incorporated into the master document automatically.

This allows you to edit the subdocuments separately. The master document only contains links to the subdocuments. The content of the subdocuments is not inserted into the master document. It allows you to combine multiple Word files into a single Word file.Ī master document is a Word file that contains links to a set of other, separate Word files, called subdocuments. It’s usually smarter to split your long documents into multiple Word files.īut, then, how do you make sure the pages are numbered correctly and easily create a table of contents and an index for the whole document? That’s where Word’s master document feature can help. Do you create really long documents in Word? If so, you probably know that Word doesn’t always play well with them.
