All in one single word

‘As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen’

This forms part of the ‘doxology’ or short hymn of praise in Roman Catholic, Anglican and other high churches. It derives from a similar practice in the Jewish synagogue. The above is the Anglican version, metrically and poetically English.

The Latin, from which it has been translated, reads:

Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum. Amen

Literally: ‘As it was in the beginning, and now, and always, and to the ages of ages. Amen’ (Note the verb is stated only once.)

However the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a version very similar to the Anglican, where each tense is separately stated, ‘was’, ‘is’ and ‘ever shall be’.

Bear in mind that the original was perhaps in Hebrew (which might be worth a visit if you are sufficiently interested) and got to Latin via Greek. But the Latin at any rate seems content merely to state the verb once, English appears to have insisted on the ‘was’, ‘is’ and ‘shall be’ being separately stated. That may be telling us something about English that makes it different to at least one of the predecessor languages. It could be that in Hebrew, for example, that there is a single verb which encompasses past, present and future, but I don’t know.

So I would suggest you have a look at Hebrew (and semitic languages generally.

see Wiki entry on ‘doxology’.

This feature has been removed in Office2013.

It isn’t really a question of what appears on the taskbar, but rather the behavior of the windows that hold the documents. (Thanks to MS for mislabeling the option and creating the confusion!)

In Word XP,2003,2007, and2010, when the option «Windows in Taskbar» or «Show all windows in taskbar»  is checked and you open multiple documents, each document gets its own set of menus or ribbons and behaves as a completely separate window. (The technical term is Single Document Interface or SDI.)

In those versions, when that option is unchecked and you open multiple documents, there is only one set of menus or ribbons. You can tile or cascade the documents within the main Word window. (The term for this is Multiple Document Interface or MDI.) The fact that there’s only one icon on the taskbar is really a side effect, but it was easier to dumb down the option name than to explain the difference between SDI and MDI.

In Word2013, MDI no longer exists, and the option doesn’t appear in the dialog.

The interesting part is that Microsoft dropped MDI from Word2000, and the outcry was so loud that they had to put it back in Word XP (a.k.a. Word2002).

Microsoft Word is one of the best programs available for Windows, which does not require an introduction. We all use it for all our documentation requirements and it is one of the most used apps when it comes to official tasks and it also caters to most personal documentation requirements. Microsoft word comes with a ton of features,  and there are some pictures, which you will hardly use in your lifetime. But, there is one important feature, that you should know about, and it can come in a handy number of situations. I am talking about compiling multiple Word documents to a single document. This might seem trivial but it can be of immense use in a number of situations, where you need to append all the documents in one single file for easier reference. 

For example, if you have sent the number of requests to your company headquarters for something, which isn’t yet addressed, you can compile all the requests in a single document and send it to the company headquarters, so that they consider it seriously. In the same way, there can be a number of situations, when it can be useful to compile multiple documents into one single document.

You can always do that manually by copying and pasting the content of every single document, but that isn’t a smart way of doing that. Just imagine you have hundreds of such documents and you can understand it can take hours or even days to copy and paste the content from every single document to the final document effectively, and call it a day. Thankfully, there is an easy way of doing exactly that on  Microsoft Word. I will discuss how you can do that here.

So, without any further delay, let’s get started with how you can append multiple Word documents to one single word document using Microsoft Word.

• Open Microsoft Word on your computer and click on the ‘Insert’ tab.

• Now, click on the small drop-down menu corresponding to ‘Object’ and then click on ‘Text from File…’.

• Now, just select the documents in a particular folder or directory, and click on the ‘Insert’ button.

• Now the text from all the documents selected by you will be inserted into the new Microsoft Word document that you are working on.

• Alternatively, you can also click on the small drop-down menu corresponding to insert and click on ‘Insert as Link’ to insert the documents as links, which can be useful to certain users in a number of situations.

One thing that you should not, while inserting the text from the individual documents in this way is that you should select the documents sequentially so that they are placed one by one in sequential order as per your selection in the current document.

So, that was quite straight forward to append text from multiple documents on to a single document If you are using Microsoft Word. The process is almost the same on all versions of Microsoft Word, starting at least from Microsoft Word 2007. Even if you are using some other word processing program apart from Microsoft Word, like LibreOffice or any other, the method isn’t going to be a lot different. In LibreOffice, there is one limitation, and that is, you will have to select the files individually, which is kind of frustrating.

So, that was all about, how you can append multiple Microsoft Word documents to one single document. Do you have anything to say? Feel free to comment on the same below.