How can you merge data from multiple source files?

[Charles Miller]

I am trying to create a database in Word (2002). My data is composed of
multiple files. ie the information for each person is in a seperate file.
There are over a thousand files that I want to merge to create a database
file. How can I do that?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Can you verify that
a. what you have is a number of Word documents containing data
b. what you want is to collect the data from all those documents into a
single .doc

You will need some VBA (or some other programming language that can automate
Word) for this, unless all the data is already in the format you need and
you can just create a new document and use e.g. Insert|File manually to
insert every one of your > 1000 files.

There are several things to consider:
a. how well do you know VBA?
b. how do you know which documents' data you want to include? Do you want
to process all the documents in a particular folder or folder+subfolders? Or
do you have a list of documents? Or something else?
c. how is the data formatted in your documents? Is the data in a table row,
or someother consistent format, and if so, what? Do all the documents have
the same format?
c. What format do you want to use in your output document? (and possibly,
"Are you sure you want to create your database in Word format?" )

Peter Jamieson