extracting data in Word for Excel

[philr]

Using Office 2003

I’m creating an Excel file to upload a few thousand text clinic notes
previously written in Word to an EMR system. On the Excel end I need a
separate record for the patient name, Med number, date of service and the
actual text. With the generous help of MVPs here I have been able to place
the body of each person’s note into a corresponding single cell.

I’ve combined many of the thousand files on the Word side into several .doc
files and am prepared to copy to Excel and manipulate the text.

Is there a way I can create 3 identifying characteristics within the Word
text file (.doc) for each patient name, med number, and date of service so
that Excel can find and copy the patient name into the same record patient
name column, the med number into the med number column, and the date of
service into the DOS column? Separate steps are fine.

I would like to avoid doing this in Excel exclusively since the cell text
takes up most of the screen when the cursor is in the cell and it appears to
be harder to navigate within the cell.

I can’t use underline or bold since these are used extensively in the Word
files. Style?

Thank you,
philr

 

[David Sisson]

Using Office 2003
I've combined many of the thousand files on the Word side into several .doc
files and am prepared to copy to Excel and manipulate the text.

How are they combined? Is the data arranged the same way as in Excel?

In a table? Use Word and convert the table to text using commas as
seperator. (My personal preference.)

Seperated by commas?

If this is the case, then simply save the files as text, or csv. Open
Excel and load csv file. Manipulate the data until it's the way you
want it.

Is there a way I can create 3 identifying characteristics within the Word
text file (.doc) for each patient name, med number, and date of service so

Reading this makes me think it's in paragraph format. While it is
possible to mark each field with a bookmark and then write the data of
the bookmark to a file, it would be laborious because you'd have to
mark each of the four fields in every file.

If you want to do it this way, head over to the Word VBA General
newgroup and read up on bookmarks.

 

[philr]

Thank you for answering.

I do have the originals in paragraph form because the macro I'm using in
Excel will replace the paragraph marks with line feeds within each cell.

I will look further into bookmarks on the Word side and extracting bookmarks
on the Excel side.

I've experimented with placing | marks before and after each field I need
and then parsing (text to columns) on the Excel side (one column full text
and identical column to be parsed) and it works for the most part. I'm not
looking forward typing these | across several thousand pages but the
alternative is a lot of cut and paste.

I'm surprised there is no software available for sale or add-on to take .doc
files and easily convert to speadsheet format. With all the push to move
documents via image processing and .xml to sort freeform data into mainframe
or data driven web sites it seems there would be a big need.

The route I'm going is quite serpentine.

Thanks for the advice.

philr