Random Formatting...I Want Tables

A

Athena

I just hired on with a new company, and I am in charge of
formatting all their long documents. We have a 90+ page
price list that has been quite randomly formatted using a
series of tabs, spaces, section and column breaks. This
thing is a piece of work...really defies all logic.

I'd like to convert the data into Word tables because the
data is constantly changing(there's still enough "fancy"
formatting that Excel may not be the best choice), and
yet, I do not know how to effectively and efficiently move
the data into the tables. I've been copying a line and
transferring it to the appropriate cell in another
document. I've got 10,000+ lines, and this has to get out
before the end of Sept. How do I expedite the process?

Thank You!!!!
 
J

Jonathan West

Hi Athena,

That's a tough one. It depends to a certain extent on how random is all is.
First thing to to is take a backup of your orihginal document. The
experiments you will need to do may mess the document up, so you want to
play with a copy and know that if the worst comes to the worst, you can go
back to your original.

They key thing about getting it into a table is getting the data into a
proper tab-delimited format first. Then its a fairly straightforward job to
then do a Convert Text to Table.

I'm not sure where the column section breaks come in, so in this answer I'm
going to concentrate on the tabs & spaces.

Assuming that every row of the table has an item in every column, then one
way to approach this is to proceed as follows.

1. Use the Edit Replace dialog to replace every tab with two spaces. You can
search for tabs by entering "^t" (without the quotes) in the Find What box
on the dialog.

2. Then use the Edit Replace dialog to replace every example of 2 or more
spaces with a tab. To do this, enter " ^w" (note the space in there) in the
Find What box, and enter "^t" in the Replace With box

3. Hopefully you now have a faily well-behaved tab-delimited list, and can
now Select it and convert it to a table.

If your data includes some blank cells in certain rows, then life becomes a
bit more complex. The procedure I just gave you will not reliably cover such
cases. However, even an imperfect conversion, leaving you with the need to
move some cells around, might be quite a lot quicker than what you are doing
now.

--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
MultiLinker - Automated generation of hyperlinks in Word
Conversion to PDF & HTML
http://www.multilinker.com
 

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