How to embed a Word document in another Word document
How to embed a Word document (or other file) in another Word document
Sometimes it makes sense to embed one Microsoft Word document in another, rather than include a link to it, or paste the contents in. This is especially useful when sending multiple documents to people who can’t access your shared files. (Though only, of course, in environments where you can be sure everybody has Microsoft Word. If that’s not assured, you should be using something more universal, such as PDF.)
For some reason Word makes it quite tricky to do, its interface preferring to send you down the path of taking the contents of your second document and pasting them into the first.
The easiest way I’ve found:
- Find your second file (the one to be embedded) in Windows Explorer. Copy it (Ctrl-C)
- Go to the spot in the document you want to embed it in
- On the menu: Edit, Paste special, paste as Word document (or as file), then turn on Display as icon. (Ignore the gibberish where it claims to be pasting as a bitmap picture.) (Note in the screen grab below how short filenames live on in WinXP/Word 2003, ten years after long filenames were introduced into Windows)
- Click Change icon
- Change the caption to something meaningful, as Word’s default behaviour is to give it the incredibly useless caption “Microsoft Word Document”
- If you want you can change the icon, though unless you’re deliberately trying to confuse people, the default is probably fine.
- OK, OK. It should be done. Test by double-clicking on the icon
Microsoft today started previewing the next version of Office. Ten bucks says it won’t make this process any easier than it is now.
January 3rd, 2007 at 09:21
Excellent. Had spent most of the day trying to work out how to do this. Thanks!
March 28th, 2007 at 18:04
Many thanks.
April 9th, 2007 at 15:48
I tried this as it looked promising. But the word document stopped responding as soon as the embedded doc was pasted to it.
Is there any other way to do this?
April 10th, 2007 at 18:46
Don’t know Amita. I tried this with Word 2003, on a couple of installations, and it worked fine. Can you open the embedded document separately?
April 20th, 2007 at 16:44
Thanks man, I needed this for a project; creating an action plan with all relevant stuff pasted in, and this was the only way!
July 31st, 2007 at 20:59
Thanks for this excellent tip; the instructions were word perfect.
August 1st, 2007 at 02:00
I have the same problem as Amita. Word 2007 locks up as soon as you try to embed a doc into a word doc. Office 2003 works fine. Tried the paste special method, regular cut & paste, and drag n drop. Same issue.
November 12th, 2007 at 15:02
Good Man!!
Thank you…
November 21st, 2007 at 02:11
Excellent, you’re the first site that comes up in google when searching for embedding docs into work !
Cheers
Faz
February 26th, 2008 at 10:49
Very, very helpful. Was at wits end. Thank you very much.