How do I convert a Word 2003 document into csv format?

[Guest]

Word 2003, unlike previous versions, won't let you use the Save As command to
save a document in csv format -- for reasons I cannot fathom -- so I'm unable
to put my mailing list into Excel, and from there into a database.

How can I make this happen? I hope I'm overlooking something simple.

 

[DerbyDad03]

I know a whole lot more about Excel than Word but I'll give this a
shot...

Text can be copied/pasted into Excel and depending on how it was
originally formatted in Word, one of two things should happen:

- Each line of text will be split into individual cells based on
spaces or tabs, or
- Each line will end up in a single cell which can then be separated
using the Data...Text to Columns feature.

Essentially the same thing(s) will happen if you save the document as
text and then use Open With...Excel.

How is the mailing list set up in Word? If I knew a little more about
the layout, I might be able to offer an way to get laid out in Excel
the way you need it.

 

[Guest]

This was very helpful. I realize in retrospect that I oversimplified my
question, because I was having other problems with Word that were
complicating conversion. My original document isn't broken up into fields yet
- e.g., the business name is followed by a carriage return, but the number,
street, city, state, and zip are all together in one line. I can usually fix
a lot of this sort of thing using Find/Replace, but for some reason, Word was
not seeing key characters when I did Replace (e.g., paragraph characters).
When I gave it another shot after getting your message, it could. I really
can't explain why.

One problem that you solved for me, however, was getting the Word document I
had massaged into Excel. I was trying to import Word documents, and Excel was
telling me that they weren't in an acceptable file format, even when I had
all the fields comma-delimited. Saving the file as text first took care of
that.

I've now got an Excel document I can work with - a few manual corrections
will be necessary, but not many. Thanks again. I may be back with more
questions; I've got more of these to work with.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Select the table, then from the Tables menu > convert table to text. Set the
delimiter as comma. Save the file as plain text and if you put quotes around
the filename it will save the filename as "filename.csv" (though Excel will
happily open it with the TXT extension).

Access will use the same data without it having to pass through Excel first?

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

Thanks, Graham. Both of your points are spot-on.

However, I only wish it were as simple as having a table in Word - some of
the fields of each record are in table format, and the rest are not: to use
the table-text converter, I'd have to use it on each individual record.
Saving the doc as text-only solves that problem, because it strips out the
table formatting. But then I ran into the bizarre problem I mentioned in my
earlier reply, where I couldn't use Find/Replace to locate paragraph returns
and other repeated character strings (to help me make my fields consistent)
because Word wasn't recognizing them. The same problem would've prevented me
from using Access to take the data, but I confess it didn't occur to me to
use Access. (I loathe Access; I'm a FileMaker fan.) I have no idea why Word
started recognizing the characters I was Find/Replacing, but once it did, the
whole operation went much more smoothly.

I'll keep Access in mind next time -!

 

[Graham Mayor]

I mentioned Access only because you said you wanted to convert to a data
file and read too much into your question.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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