How to Use altChunk for Document Assembly

From Eric White’s Blog.  The link.

Merging multiple word processing documents into a single document is something that many people want to do.  An application built for attorneys might assemble selected standard clauses into a contract.  An application built for book publishers can assemble chapters of a book into a single document.  This post explains the semantics of the altChunk element, and provides some code using the Open XML SDK that shows how to use altChunk.

Instead of using altChunk, you could write a program to merge the Open XML markup for documents.  You would need to deal with a number of issues, including merging style sheets and resolving conflicting styles, merging the comments from all of the documents, merging bookmarks, and more.  This is doable, but it’s a lot of work.  You can use altChunk to let Word 2007 do the heavy lifting for you.