Sir, you are a lifesaver! Thank you!

your macro indeed works for smaller files, like the one I attached, but on larger files, like the ones I usually work with (20-80 pages), it does not. it starts doing something, but then just stops and quits the original word file.

I narrowed it down to the existence of page breaks or column breaks. If I use page breaks, then the above macro does not work correctly. If I use column breaks, it works like a charm!