Need help

[Guest]

Hi, I have about 600 MSWord .doc files that are basically in letter format
(proposals, invoices that Ive written over the years). Im trying to create a
simple customer list with names, addresses. Is there a program that can go
through these files and extract/retrieve the names & addresses? It would take
a long time to open each file manually and copy&paste the text from each one!

 

[Doug Robbins]

If the arrangement of the documents, or more particularly the names and
addresses is consistent enough, it should be possible to use a macro to open
each document and extract that information, creating another document
containing the required information from all of the original documents.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Jezebel]

No. You could write a macro to do it, but it would rely on the documents
being consistently formatted (eg name is paragraph 2, address is paragraphs
3-5, etc). This is rarely the case. In practice the sort of code you run
gets it 'sort of' right, and you then spend more time finding and fixing the
errors.

Anyway, doing it manually won't really take so long: about 15 seconds each,
so less than three hours to do the lot.