New in Writer: Combine an MS Word document with your Writer document

New in Writer: Combine an MS Word document with your Writer document

We understand that some people you work with every day won't be on Writer. Often, you're forced to export your Writer doc as an MS Word file and pass it around as an email attachment. Your collaborator then takes a look, makes changes, and sends a revised document back to you.

Your original document and the one your collaborator revised then exist as two different files, making it difficult for you to track what's changed and maintain a master file. The new Combine Revisions feature in Writer solves these problems.


How it works

  1. Go to the Review mode and click Combine Revisions.
  2. Choose your MS Word document (.docx or .doc file) from your computer.
  3. Once imported, choose either of the combine options to proceed:
    • Combine and create a new document: To generate a new document by merging the selected document with your existing Writer document.
    • Combine changes to the current document: To blend changes from the selected document with your existing Writer document.



Note that in both cases, insertions and deletions will appear as markup so that you can accept or reject changes individually.

You can also tell Writer the name of the collaborator who worked on the revision. This information will be used to tag the changes and to create a unique file name for the combined document generated.



That's all for now. Let us know how you like this feature in the comment section below.

Happy writing!