C#/VB.NET: Merge Word Documents

Long papers or research reports are often completed collaboratively by multiple people. To save time, each person can work on their assigned parts in separate documents and then merge these documents into one after finish editing. Apart from manually copying and pasting content from one Word document to another, this article will demonstrate the following two ways to merge Word documents programmatically using Spire.Doc for .NET .

Install Spire.Doc for .NET

To begin with, you need to add the DLL files included in the Spire.Doc for.NET package as references in your .NET project. The DLL files can be either downloaded from this link or installed via NuGet.

PM> Install-Package Spire.Doc

Merge Documents by Inserting the Entire File

The Document.InsertTextFromFile() method provided by Spire.Doc for .NET allows merging Word documents by inserting other documents entirely into a document. Using this method, the contents of the inserted document will start from a new page. The detailed steps are as follows:

  • Create a Document instance.
  • Load the original Word document using Document.LoadFromFile() method.
  • Insert another Word document entirely to the original document using Document.InsertTextFromFile() method.
  • Save the result document using Document.SaveToFile() method.
  • C#
  • VB.NET
using Spire.Doc;

namespace MergeWord
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Create a Document instance 
            Document document = new Document();

            //Load the original Word document
            document.LoadFromFile("Doc1.docx", FileFormat.Docx);

            //Insert another Word document entirely to the original document
            document.InsertTextFromFile("Doc2.docx", FileFormat.Docx);

            //Save the result document
            document.SaveToFile("MergedWord.docx", FileFormat.Docx);
        }
    }
}

C#/VB.NET: Merge Word Documents

Merge Documents by Cloning Contents

If you want to merge documents without starting a new page, you can clone the contents of other documents to add to the end of the original document. The detailed steps are as follows:

  • Load two Word documents.
  • Loop through the second document to get all the sections using Document.Sections property, and then loop through all the sections to get their child objects using Section.Body.ChildObjects property.
  • Get the last section of the first document using Document.LastSection property, and then add the child objects to the last section of the first document using LastSection.Body.ChildObjects.Add() method.
  • Save the result document using Document.SaveToFile() method.
  • C#
  • VB.NET
using Spire.Doc;

namespace MergeWord
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Load two Word documents
            Document doc1 = new Document("Doc1.docx");
            Document doc2 = new Document("Doc2.docx");

            //Loop through the second document to get all the sections
            foreach (Section section in doc2.Sections)
            {

                //Loop through the sections of the second document to get their child objects
                foreach (DocumentObject obj in section.Body.ChildObjects)
                {

                    // Get the last section of the first document
                     Section lastSection = doc1.LastSection;

                    //Add all child objects to the last section of the first document
                    lastSection.Body.ChildObjects.Add(obj.Clone());
                }
            }

            // Save the result document
            doc1.SaveToFile("MergeDocuments.docx", FileFormat.Docx);
        }
    }
} 

C#/VB.NET: Merge Word Documents

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