converting word files to Access or Excel

[Guest]

3/30/2005.

Dear Madam/ Sir:

A) I have a very large collection of Arabic-English different glossaries
(about ONE million various terms in both languages) that have been saved over
the years in tens of separate MS-Word files (Windows 1995- 2000), each Arabic
term has been typed and saved opposite its English word equivalent.

B) Kindly do me a BIG favor and let me know the availability of any good
software that can help me merge easily and accurately such a huge quantity of
terms into one BIG file with as many editing options as possible, such as (IF
that is possible) add, delete, find, replace, select, paste, undo, print and
sort.

C) A friend of mine has heard someone mentioning that MS- ACCESS or Excel
program can handle such a job but, unfortunately, neither of us know anything
about how to do it by using either Access or Excel.

D) For your kind information, I am a computer novice! and would rather very
much to have something that is ready made.

Many thanks in anticipation of your generous help and speedy favorable reply.

Best Regards.

Osama Saleh
Email: (e-mail address removed)

 

[John Nurick]

Hello Osama,

The number of terms you have rules out the use of Excel, which has a
limit of approximately 65,000 rows on a worksheet.

Access can handle millions of records without difficulty, but if you
have any special formatting in your data (such as variations in fonts,
subscripts, superscripts, etc.) the standard Access textboxes cannot
display it and the level of complication increases.

Current versions of Access use Unicode to display multiple scripts
without difficulty, but there could be problems converting your older
Word documents from the pre-Unicode fonts and encodings.

The layout of your Word documents is also an important factor in how
difficult or easy it will be to move the data from there into an Access
database: when you say "typed and saved opposite its English word
equivalent", was this done by using a two-column table in Word, or by
custom tab stops, or by tabbing multiple times, or how?

Finally, there seem to be few people here who are familiar with Arabic
script or the special considerations of using left-to-right and
right-to-left scripts. We'll help you as far as we can, but I suggest
that you also post your question (if you have not already done so) in
the Arabic language Access newsgroup
microsoft.public.arabic.access
You can reach this via http://groups.google.com or by using Outlook
Express or another news reader to connect to news.microsoft.com.

You may also like to investigate specialist glossary management
software. It's not an area I'm familiar with, but see for instance
http://www.lexicool.com/soft_lingo2.asp
http://sourceforge.net/projects/glossword/
http://www.translatum.gr/dics/translation-tools.htm
http://www2.sbbs.se/hp/cfalk/tipseng.htm

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:21:02 -0800, "Osama Saleh" <Osama