Can I "Get *this* table and put *here*"?

[Ed]

I hope I can word this intelligently. I get a range from an Excel
spreadsheet and paste it as a table into Word. The Word table is then
broken into several smaller tables, based on a code group in the last
column - this is saved as its own document. Could be anywhere from 20-40
smaller tables, each of which needs to go in its corresponding place in a
report. There are actually about a hundred possible code groups.

Is there any way I can write some code for the report that will:
(A) find the code group mentioned in the paragraph preceeding the table's
place,
(B) open the document with the tables, find the right one, and paste it in,
and
(C) automatically update the report upon opening with the latest saved
tables?

Ed

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Ed,

Since no one else has replied to your post, I'll take a stab at it.

The sort of thing you propose is certainly possible, but there are a few
more bits of information you need to supply to make a reasonable start on
the macro.

- Are the names of the report and the table document well known in advance,
or do they change from one run to the next?
- Are you sure there is one paragraph in the report for each table, and one
table for each paragraph? Or could there be some "not found", or some
two-to-one correspondences?
- When you say the code group is "mentioned" in a paragraph, is it the only
thing in the paragraph, or is it surrounded by other text? How do you
recognize that a particular piece of text is, or contains, a code group?
Could there be a third document containing a list of all possible code
groups?
- Do all the tables have the same number of columns, so you know the code
groups are in column x, or is the column count variable?
- Do you have separate templates (not Normal.dot) dedicated to creating
reports and table documents?
- Do you already have a macro to chop up the big table into smaller ones, or
does the report macro need to do that as well?

Just off the top of my head, I think the programming will go easier if the
macro looks at the code group in a table, searches the report document for
that code group, and copies the table as the next paragraph; then goes to
the next table, etc. Can you see any objection to that method?


There are probably some other questions that ought to be asked, but that'll
do for a start.