Multiple Word documents merged using "Insert as link"

EndNote EndNote Product Suggestions
1

I have a feature request for users who depend on Microsoft Word’s document merging tools, and specifically when using the merging option Insert as link, to combine multiple Word document files into a single, aggregate Word document.

Some common use cases are:

  • Collaborative Writing. Each author creates one or more Word documents that provide that author’s contributions to a report. A master Word document is then created by merging (using Word’s Insert as link option) the contents of the individual Word files into a single “master” Word document. Within the master Word document, the EndNote add-in scrapes the EndNote references from (a) the merged (linked) Word documents and (b) the master document to build the “Bibliography” section at the end of the master document.
  • Theses and Doctoral Dissertations. This use case is similar to the collaborative writing case, except the individual documents are typically created by a single author—e.g., individual sections of a dissertation stored in separate Word documents are then merged together (using the Insert as link option) to produce a final, master Word document.
  • Instructor Handouts. Course instructors who want to create handouts—e.g., course syllabi, assignment handouts, etc.—that contain boilerplate text sourced from link merged Word documents—e.g., grading policies, college/university policies, assignment submission instructions, etc.

For the discussion that follows,

  • The phrase link merged describes a Word document whose contents are/were merged into another Word document using the Insert as link merge option.
  • The phrase chapter document describes a Word document whose contents are link merged into a master document.
  • The phrase master document describes a Word document that contains one or more link merged Word documents, and possibly its own content—i.e., content that is not provided by the link merged Word documents.
  • The EndNote citations used in the chapter and master documents are obtained from a single EndNote library that I’ll call sources.enl. (For the collaborative writing case, the authors could use cloud storage to share a single EndNote library.)
  • In the chapter documents, the user (a) converts the in-text EndNote citations into unformatted citations, and (b) deletes the EndNote Bibliography content—i.e., the user deletes the Word document field code { ADDIN EN.REFLIST }. In other words, the chapter documents do have unformatted, in-text EndNote citations obtained from library sources.enl, but these documents do not have a “Bibliography” section at their end.
  • The phrase unformatted citation is an in-text citation created with EndNote, and converted to an unformatted citation using the EndNote 21 tab on Word’s ribbon bar and the options Convert Citations and Bibliography > Convert to Unformatted Citations.

For the requested feature, the desired workflow would be something like this:

  1. Create a chapter document (e.g., chapter-01.docx) that contains unformatted citations obtained from EndNote library sources.enl. The author removes the “Bibliography” section (i.e., the { ADDIN EN.REFLIST } document field) from this document before saving and closing the document.
  2. Create another chapter document (e.g., chapter-02.docx) that also contains unformatted citations obtained from EndNote library sources.enl. The author removes the “Bibliography” section (i.e., the { ADDIN EN.REFLIST } document field) from this document before saving and closing the document.
  3. Create a master Word document (e.g., master.docx). Open the master document in Word and use the following workflow to link merge the contents of file chapter-01.docx into file master.docx:
    a. On Word’s ribbon bar, select the Insert tab, and in the Text gallery expand the Object drop-down and select the option Text from file….
    b. When the Insert File dialog appears, browse to and select the file chapter-01.docx. Next, expand the dialog’s Insert button and select the option Insert as Link.
  4. In file master.docx, position the text insertion caret on a new/blank line at the end of the file.
    [Note 1: Ensure the blank line is not the last line of the link merged file chapter-01.docx. –end note]
    Use steps 3a and 3b above to link merge the contents of file chapter-02.docx into file master.docx.
  5. In file master.docx, position the text insertion caret on a new/blank line at the end of the file.
    [Note 2: Ensure the blank line is not the last line of the link merged file chapter-02.docx. –end note]
    On a line by itself, type the Bibliography and then press the Enter key.
  6. In file master.docx, on Word’s ribbon bar, select the EndNote 21 tab, and in the Bibliography gallery click on Update Citations and Bibliography button to generate the bibliography. EndNote should then scan the contents of file master.docx—including the contents of the link merged Word document files chapter-01.docx and chapter-02.docx—to scrape up the EndNote citations from these documents, and then it should use the scraped citations to generate the bibliography content in file master.docx (i.e., to create the Word document field code { ADDIN EN.REFLIST }).

For what it’s worth, people in academia would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to have this workflow, or something like it, available to them when using EndNote. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, EndNote 21 does not presently have this capability. Consequently, I’m currently telling my students they should NOT use EndNote 21 if they want to collaboratively write reports using link merged content, simply because EndNote 21 cannot (to my knowledge) scrape EndNote citations from link merged documents. In other words, you are losing revenue because college and university faculty and students cannot use EndNote 21 for large, complex, collaborative writing projects where the master report document contains link merged content containing EndNote citations.

And for what it’s worth, don’t bother suggesting that a report’s authors can use copy-and-paste to transfer the contents of individual chapter documents into the master document. If an author changes the contents of one of the chapter documents, the author(s) must then manually update the master document, which is an error-prone task. I can personally attest that this workflow isn’t realistic or sustainable for large, complex master documents.

1 Like