Opening Multiple Recent Files at the Same Time

Many times David regularly works on a limited set of documents. When he clicks the File tab of the ribbon, he can see a list of recently opened files. David wonders if there is a way that he can choose to open two (or more) of the files that appear in that list.

The list of files that David sees is most often referred to as the "MRU list" or the "MRU files." MRU is an acronym for "most recently used," and these files are (as you might guess) the files most recently used by David on his system. In reality, these days Word maintains two semi-related MRU lists. (It has been this way since the advent of Word 2010.) You can read about this at this tip:

Understanding MRU Files

What David wants to do—select multiple files in the MRU in order to open them all at once—is something I've not been able to discover a way to do. Most people who work with multiple files at once use either the Windows Explorer to locate the files in a single folder, or they use the Open dialog box, as described in this tip:

Opening Multiple Documents at Once

These approaches, though, require that all the files you want to open be located in the same folder—a prerequisite that is not necessary for files in the MRU.

It may be possible to create a macro to present the files in the MRU and allow some to be selected to open, but this is no small undertaking. The MRU files can be grabbed in a macro using the technique described in this tip:

Grabbing the MRU List

Grabbing the files isn't the problem, though. The problem is presenting what you grab to the user and then allowing the user to select only a subset of what you grabbed. The typical way of doing this would be to create a UserForm to display the files, use that UserForm to allow the user to specify the files, and then open the ones selected. This is not a small task, and (quite honestly) the amount of time required to develop such a macro would make such an approach "overkill" for what David really needs.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (5224) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.