Hi Lamya,

Since you can still access the content, I'd suggest the following process for each document:
• insert a new paragraph mark at the end of each document
• copy everything except that new last paragraph mark
• open a new document and paste what you've just copied into it.
Once you've done that, you can ditch the master document and those linked to it.

If you want to, you can achieve most of the master document functionality via INCLUDETEXT fields. Basically, these allow you to link a number of documents together, so that updates to a source document are automatically reflected in the target document. In your case, you might have one target document (holding all the INCLUDETEXT fields) and a number of source documents to which those fields point. See Word's Help file for details. If need be, you can use the target document to edit the source documents, including cutting & pasting material between source documents. All you need to do is to select the relevant INCLUDETEXT field and press Ctrl-Shift-F7 after making the edits.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]