MS Word query

[Dolby]

Does anybody know how i would do the following:

In MS word i have a 535pg document with bulleted contacts. I need to delete certain sections of the information. As far as i know, you can replace it with ',' using the find and replace function but i dont know how. for example:

■ AACC - Association Algérienne de Lutte Contre la Corruption (Algeria) Mailing address: Centre Familial de Ben Aknoun Alger 16 Algeria
Other address: Tel.: Fax: E-mail: [email protected] Web page: http://www.transparency.org/ Category: 6. CSO Notes:

would need to become:

AACC - Association Algérienne de Lutte Contre la Corruption (Algeria),[email protected]

there are over 4000 of these and i dont want to have to do this manually as it will take me forever.

any pointers?

 

[lucifir]

mayb try loading into excel as separate columns and just cut the unwanted items out .... not sure if it will work with the data you have, but that would be the easiest to try

 

[SecretCode]

■ AACC - Association Algérienne de Lutte Contre la Corruption (Algeria) Mailing address: Centre Familial de Ben Aknoun Alger 16 Algeria
Other address: Tel.: Fax: E-mail: [email protected] Web page: http://www.transparency.org/ Category: 6. CSO Notes:

would need to become:

AACC - Association Algérienne de Lutte Contre la Corruption (Algeria),[email protected]

If every line has the form
<text> Mailing address: <text> Other address: Tel.: Fax: E-mail: <text> Web page: <text> Category: <text> Notes:
Then you should be able to do a search and replace of each one of those fixed strings to a comma* and then import the document into excel and use excel's text to columns feature. And then delete the columns you don't need.

* Actually a comma may be a bad choice: if any address or other field has a comma in already, it will be messed up. MS Office products are not very consistent with comma-separated-values formats.

Whoever sent you data in this format should be spanked...

 

[SecretCode]

It would be easier in Perl... if you have access to anyone who knows Perl.

 

[Moederloos]

convert to RTF and do a regex replace?

Not sure how much formatting you can afford to lose etc.

 

[Dolby]

Hi,
Unfortunately the data was all identically ordered but not all fields were complete for each one. (some didnt have web pages or phone/fax numbers etc etc.) However, somebody wrote a script that deleted all the uneccessary info for me so i am sorted. but thanks!
( having saved the info into *.csv, i have now successfully imported it into an outlook contacts database).

 

[bekdik]

Play around with cntrl+H look at the advanced replace functions

You'll probably need to do several passes changing different bita at a time