SDL Trados Studio - QuickMerge (Open more than one file at the same time)

In addition to the old feature of merging files together when you create a new project, Studio 2014 now lets you merge any files together on the fly in a virtual way, with all the advantages that this brings in terms of auto-propagation, spell-checking, etc. The other day I wanted to change something in a set of files I’d translated, but I couldn’t remember which file it was in. I opened them all with QuickMerge and found it immediately with Ctrl+F.

How do you perform QuickMerge? Simply select a group of files in the target file view and press Enter to open them as a single “virtually” merged file.

A few useful tricks to know when you’re using QuickMerge:

• If you select a group of adjacent files using the shift key, Studio will merge them in the order they appear in the files list.
• To specify the order the files are merged in, select each file from the list using Ctrl + left mouse click and Studio will open them in the order that you selected them.
• If you have a lot of files and want to shuffle them around first, then programs such as Bulk Rename will let you re-order your file list, prefix an incremental number to each filename, [translate in Studio with QuickMerge] and then remove the prefix.
• To open several files at a time, unmerged and under separate tabs, just select the files and click Ctrl+Enter.
• Segment numbering restarts at the beginning of each file, so if you’re searching, say, for segment 20 using GoTo (Ctrl+G), you can jump between the different no. 20s by using Previous and Next (Ctrl+J).
• In the Editor view you can easily see where one file ends and the next one starts in the navigation pane on the left. Click a file name there if you want to jump to the same file in your translation.

One last point about QuickMerge: you can’t use it to merge several files for external review. They’re only “virtually” merged after all, and would fall apart on their way over to Word.