Copying Word files into one huge honkin' Word doc?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Nancy McDonald is <<...putting many Word files together into a "wholedoc" w/
some 220 pages to date.  Now I am trying to include the "appendix" and the
first one is a 40-some page file (also Word) which, whenever I try to paste
into the wholedoc, I get a WinWord crash. I've tried to copy/paste the
appendix into a new doc, and no problem, no crash.>>

Word is likely running out of memory or some other system "resources" (no
matter how much you have of a resource, a poorly implemented function can
still use up the whole resource and cause a crash). As well, it's not always
a good idea to copy from a file that's already open. I've (rarely) seen
strange behavior that suggests there's a glitch in this somewhere. Sometimes
doing a "save as" and giving the file a new name, then closing the file, is
all you need to allow for a safe cut and paste. But if you're really trying
to merge the two documents, Word offers a better/safer/faster way to do it.
First, position the cursor where you're trying to insert the new file. Then
open the Insert menu and choose File. Voila! I've never had this approach
crash and burn if the other file was closed before I started.

<<I'm beginning to think that the crash is happening with the huge doc which
just cannot handle any more data??>>

Possibly, but not in the way you're thinking. Several techwhirlers claim to
produce manuals up to 500 pages in Word with no difficulty. One thing you
might want to check: is "Fast save" enabled in either document? That's a
recipe for disaster, and particularly so when you're copying or inserting a
file into another. If you really had trouble deleting part of the footer,
it's possible that the file's been corrupted somehow. Try the "save as"
trick again, since that often fixes a corruption.

<<that brings me to another question:  How to get several files into one
PDF??)>>

If you've got Acrobat Exchange, there's a simple drag and drop mechanism,
and you can import/insert files just like I suggested with Word. I don't
have the software handy, so I can't tell you specific menus etc. Hopefully
someone else can provide details.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer