Importing WordPerfect .dat files to Word (or Office) and creating

[TMO]

Opening a WP .dat file in Word result in a document in which formatting (end
field, end record, skip page break, etc.) are lost, leaving a single recors
in lines equivalent to the old WP "fields", with a page break at each record.

How can these files be converted to a mailing lists workable in Word (or
other Office WP ap) and maintainable as records?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Yes. Without knowing exactly how they're laid out, I'd suggest that the
basic requirement will be to convert the text to a table. I'll assume you
have something like this (where ¶ represents a paragraph break and <p>
represents a page break):

Name¶
Company¶
Street Address¶
City, State ZIP¶
<p>

The first thing to do is to replace the paragraph breaks with tab characters
(that is, replace ^p with ^t). Then replace the page breaks (^m) with
paragraph breaks (^p). This will give you continuous text with each record
in its own paragraph, the fields separated by tabs.

Select the text (if necessary) and use Table | Convert | Text to Table,
separating at tabs. This should give you a table with a column for each
field and a row for each record. This can be used as a mail merge data
source.

Obviously, if what you have differs from the example I've given, you'll have
to adjust the procedure, but the basic principles will still apply.