Cleaning up a document programmatically?

[Sandi Vogel]

I get so much great info from this forum; I thought I'd give this a shot: is
there a way to programmatically clean up a poorly formatted document? It 80
pages of normal style, tab-tab-tab-paragraph, manually numbering and has
sporadic, incorrect manual TOC markings. I was planning on clearing all
manual formatting, using search & replace to get rid of tabs & manual
markings and apply numbered styles throughout for the TOC. Is there a better
way? (Sorry if my search skills failed me & this is a standard question!)

--Sandi
P.S., I'm Helpdesk/Trainer who offers a Styles class regularly, screams
Styles often, and now this document has become the Help Desk responsibility
because it won't behave for a user who refuses to learn Styles. I'm very
beginner-level VBA.

 

[Jean-Guy Marcil]

Sandi Vogel was telling us:
Sandi Vogel nous racontait que :

I get so much great info from this forum; I thought I'd give this a
shot: is there a way to programmatically clean up a poorly formatted
document? It 80 pages of normal style, tab-tab-tab-paragraph,
manually numbering and has sporadic, incorrect manual TOC markings.
I was planning on clearing all manual formatting, using search &
replace to get rid of tabs & manual markings and apply numbered
styles throughout for the TOC. Is there a better way? (Sorry if my
search skills failed me & this is a standard question!)

--Sandi
P.S., I'm Helpdesk/Trainer who offers a Styles class regularly,
screams Styles often, and now this document has become the Help Desk
responsibility because it won't behave for a user who refuses to
learn Styles. I'm very beginner-level VBA.

The best you could do, is record a few simple macros that remove repetitive
characters and so forth.

Formatting a document, when the original state is unpredictable, cannot
really be done entirely programmatically.


--

Salut!
_______________________________________
Jean-Guy Marcil - Word MVP
(e-mail address removed)
Word MVP site: http://www.word.mvps.org

 

[Sandi Vogel]

Thanks - I'm just learning the magic of VBA and thought maybe, possibly I
might be missing something.

 

[Klaus Linke]

There are some commercial tools (say DocTidy).
I don't have much experience with them... Maybe you could download the
evaluation version to see if it works for you.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Greg Maxey]

It won't do it all, but you might have a look at:

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Clean_Up_Text.htm