Converting Word Docs To Excel
Converting Word Docs To Excel
Before starting, review your list and look for common denominators and possible exceptions. In these cases, the records were uniform with each one consisting of three lines with a blank line in between.
10. Click Replace All. 11. Click Close. Microsoft Word will give you a count of how many replacements it made. Don't worry that your formatting looks off and various lines look combined.
Your document probably looks worse, but don't worry as to create you often need to destroy. Part of this may be word wrap and part of it is our formatting. The next steps will put it into perspective. 1. Go to the top of your document 2. From the Edit menu, select Replace. 3. Your Find and Replace dialog will have your previous values. Remove the paragraph mark in the Find what: textbox and type in a tilde. 4. In the Replace with: textbox, clear out the tilde 5. Click Special 6. Select Paragraph Marks from the pop up menu 7. Click Replace All 8. Click Close. If you have extra commas or paragraph marks on the last line, you can delete them. If you're really fastidious and don't like the space before the State, you can do another search and replace. Personally, I would do this in Excel with ASAP Utilities which is a free add on.
3. In the Open dialog, change the Files of Type: entry to Text Files 4. Point to your .txt file. 5. Click Open 6. The Text Import Wizard should start. Keep the default values and click Next. 7. In Step 2, change your Delimiter from Tab to Comma. The screen should adjust to show the fields in columns. 8. In Step 3, you can change the data format for each column or click Finish to accept General format.
Final Tweaks
Chances are you will want to do some minor tweaking. As example, you probably want to add column labels. Also, if you have US addresses, you may want to split the last column that has the State and Zip code combined. You may also want to split the name column into first and last names. In our example, this is easy as a space separates the first and last name or the state and zip code. To parse a column into multiple columns, 1. Highlight your column 2. From the Data menu, select Text to Columns 3. Click the Next button on the Convert Text to Columns Wizard 4. In the Delimiters box for Step 2, select Space 5. Click Next 6. Define your data format. (Note: For zip codes, you may want to change the data format to Text if you have zip codes starting with 0.) While these steps may not work exactly for your list, they should provide the basis for creating the records in Microsoft Word. Your list may be slightly different or include additional items such as email addresses. Either way, you could use similar steps to create a document that Microsoft Excel can interpret. In Part 2, we will use tables to accomplish a similar result.