I can't imagine trying to prepare any book from 1200+ individual documents.
Even if you don't combine *all* of them into a single document, I would
still just divide the book into a few files. How many will depend on the
length of the total. If this is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then one
document per volume might be feasible. If it's a single-volume encyclopedia,
you might get by with four or five documents.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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"Donald C. McNeilly" wrote in message
...
Am preparing an encyclopedia that will have about 1200 + entries. Each
entry
is a separate document. I need a total word count for all docs. I can use
an
'open' window showing the statistics and enter word count into a
spreadsheet
but it seems as if there should be an easier way. Other option might be to
merge all the documents into one but have heard horror stories about
dealing
with large docs in word. Also, I cannot find any automatic way of doing
this; just cut and paste each doc into one. That would be as laborious as
doing the spreadsheet count. Publisher is willing to take the docs as
individual entries so we have no need to merge them all.
Appreciate any help. Have had great luck with the publisher group.

dcmc