I’m not sure what question you’re asking. This particular situation didn’t involve formatting issues. There are, or at least used to be, ways to combine several Word documents with different formatting into a single master document, retaining the format of each document, but that’s a whole different set of issues…

Well, DeskTop Search is generally useful, and basically seems to be the right tool for this job – what if you do need to do it again? What if you need infomation which was lost in the import to Word? What if somone changes the requirements ever so slightly?

My view is certainly colored by my perspective that some of my job is dealing with the above issues.

cd C:\mydirectory

…and then if your files are named file001.txt, file002.txt, etc., you can issue the command…

copy file*.txt bigfile.txt

…where bigfile.txt is the name of the new, concatenated file. If the files don’t have nice neat sequential filenames like that, just create a new directory to work in and move them all there first (using Explorer or command line, whichever you prefer) — then you can just…

copy *.* bigfile.txt

I believe they are pulled into the concatenated file in ASCII order by filename. Hope that helps somebody.

I agree on the problem of special tools for infrequent jobs. My gut suspicion is that problems like this are more frequent than most would realize, but it’s hard to really have perspective as a “techie”. Of course, the other difficulty is people who even do some task frequently don’t necessarily realize those tools are out there that could make their job easier. Ah well, the infamous catch-22 of the computing world.

1. She needs to actually look at the text in each file, and it’s only a few lines per file. The big problem is opening and closing all those files. This quick technique eliminates that.

2. These are log files from MS SQL and related items; they’re all from Windows boxes.

3. If “Cat” will do the same thing on Windows that it does in Unix, that is, concatenate huge numbers of files in a single step,that might be equally straightforward…thanks.

4. I’m guessing that it’s not a case where a regular expression will find the problem. It is a case where she thinks the visual scan won’t take long.

Overall, there’s another issue: For something you only need to do, say, once or once a year, why would you go find and learn a new tool or utility when something you already know will do the job? That’s my attitude on “special keyboard tricks” in most applications as well: Unless it’s something I do at least a few times a month, why would I bother trying to memorize stuff that might save me two keystrokes at a time?

For me, for now, the only keystroke combos that matter are ctrl-c [copy], ctrl-v [paste], ctrl-z [undo, particularly nice for turning "smart quotes" back into inch signs when I'm talking about measurements], and alt-shift-x, Index, when I’m updating the C&I index document. For other people, these are pointless to remember, but other keystroke combos are wonderful. Ditto “when to use right-mouse,” although with Windows apps the answer is almost always “give it a try.”