How to unlock the power of Office 2003?

[Guest]

I have large amounts of old Word docs created (related to our company products) by numerous people with pretty standard sub headings inside.

How do I use the power of XML conversion or anything that Office 2003 can offer to store data from the docs into like "Excel" columns of information so that another user can use some interface to
1. See and choose from all the variable areas of work possible for each "column" of information (am thinking in Excel mindset) e.g. under "products" column, there are forecasting systems, sales systems, operations systems and under "cost" column there are low, medium, high and very high etc (something like auto filter capability).
2. Select combination of variables across "columns".
3. And later print out a report adhering to the particular selection containing more data that is written under the particular variables chosen e.g. a selection with Forecasting systems and high cost would have some writeup about the particular forecasting system in it automatically and the pre sales guys saves time and just have to vet the draft that was auto created from his selection .
4. And it should be accessible to only allowed personnel who do quotes for the company.

Regards,
KK

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?S0sgT25n?=,

I have large amounts of old Word docs created (related to our company products) by

numerous people with pretty standard sub headings inside.The first step you'd need to take would be to open each and every document then "Save As"
XML type. Since the documents won't contain any XML mark-up, you'd have to save as WordML.

From this point on, you can work through any XMLParser to extract the data and, using a
Transform, put it together in the desired format (probably as another XML file, or as an
"old-fashioned" delimited text file). This can then be imported into Excel, for example,
or another interface.

You biggest problem is going to be extracting the data in a reasonable manner. As it
stands, the only thing you'll have to go on will be style formatting, really. You'll find
information on the WordML specification in the Office section of msdn.microsoft.com

For follow-up questions, I recommend the office.xml newsgroup.

How do I use the power of XML conversion or anything that Office 2003 can offer to store

data from the docs into like "Excel" columns of information so that another user can use
some interface to

1. See and choose from all the variable areas of work possible for each "column" of

information (am thinking in Excel mindset) e.g. under "products" column, there are
forecasting systems, sales systems, operations systems and under "cost" column there are
low, medium, high and very high etc (something like auto filter capability).

2. Select combination of variables across "columns".
3. And later print out a report adhering to the particular selection containing more

data that is written under the particular variables chosen e.g. a selection with
Forecasting systems and high cost would have some writeup about the particular forecasting
system in it automatically and the pre sales guys saves time and just have to vet the
draft that was auto created from his selection .

4. And it should be accessible to only allowed personnel who do quotes for the company.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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