Strange as this may sound, you could actually do a fair bit of the work using WordPad. Simply opening a document in WordPad, making a trivial edit, then re-saving the file is enough to strip out all Style information, leaving behind just the formatted content (not sure how tables, shapes, etc.. fare). Using Section breaks to manage any differences in page layout, these WordPad-modified files could then be combined in Word.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]