Does an application exist to extract a selected point of data from a large number of Microsoft Word files? on Yedda

Does an application exist to extract a selected point of data from a large number of Microsoft Word files?

Does an application exist that will extract only a selected point of data from a Microsoft Word file? I need it to do this without opening every one of them all at once. I just need the data to be extracted, so that I can somehow export it to my destination (maybe as a comma delimited file?) into Microsoft Excel or a similar application. I thought this would be a lot more productive than opening every single file.

I have hundreds of reports which are mainly made up of text on my drive, but I only need to open each report to get one selected number (our media index) that appears within the same context, same wording on the first page of each report. It dawned on me that there might be a piece of software out there or an application (or even a tool already at my disposal under XP).

Any info on how to better accomplish this task or on a piece of software would be appreciated. If not a software, what type of programming might I consider learning in the future that might allow me to accomplish this? Would Visual Basic be the one?

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EscApe

18 answers

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I recommend making a macro. Using macro, you don't need to use any external programming language and it's quite quick to build a new macro.

Macro should:

- open one Word file

- select text you want it to select

- close Word file

- open Excel file and paste data

- open next Word file

- select text you want it to select

- close Word file

- paste to Excel

and so on.

Posted 2 years ago ( permalink )

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RecordSage

51 answers

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I'm not aware of any particular program to do this, but it could be written relatively easily in VBA, provided you know VBA. You'd need to write a routine to read through a directory (you'd store all of the docs in that one directory), and for each file open it in word and perform needed search and extraction into another doc or text file or format it as HTML.

Posted 2 years ago ( permalink )

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