Tagging text in Word documents

[Guest]

I am a writer of non-fiction books, and have a huge quantity of research
notes (amounting to over 1m words) in Word format, all organised using
outlining, many containing hyperlinks.
In order to make sense of the information these notes contain, I want to do
the following:
- select a passage of text in a document
- give that text a label or 'tag' describing what it contains. E.g., if it
is about John Smith, tag it 'John Smith'. I could do something like this by
assigning that text with a style called 'John Smith'. Alternatively, having
Office 2003 Pro, I could use XML tags.
- extract all the text with a given tag from any given set of documents,
with the extracts hyperlinked to where they came from. So, in the example
above, I would tell this tool to search through all the documents in my
research folder for any text tagged 'John Smith', copy and paste-as-hyperlink
the results in a new document, which will now show me all the information I
have on John Smith.

Does anyone know of a tool that would do this? Or the feasability (and cost)
of getting one written using Word Visual Basic?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

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I don't see an answer, so I'll just write out what occurs to me.

1. I don't know of any tool that would do this.

2. It would almost certainly be programmable in VBA. A word.vba group would be
the better place to pursue the question of programming a custom tool.

3. Word's Index feature would almost do this, except it doesn't hyperlink. I
have worked out a tool that will hyperlink an Index in a single Word document,
but have never considered trying to make it work across documents.

I am a writer of non-fiction books, and have a huge quantity of research
notes (amounting to over 1m words) in Word format, all organised using
outlining, many containing hyperlinks.
In order to make sense of the information these notes contain, I want to do
the following:
- select a passage of text in a document
- give that text a label or 'tag' describing what it contains. E.g., if it
is about John Smith, tag it 'John Smith'. I could do something like this by
assigning that text with a style called 'John Smith'. Alternatively, having
Office 2003 Pro, I could use XML tags.
- extract all the text with a given tag from any given set of documents,
with the extracts hyperlinked to where they came from. So, in the example
above, I would tell this tool to search through all the documents in my
research folder for any text tagged 'John Smith', copy and paste-as-hyperlink
the results in a new document, which will now show me all the information I
have on John Smith.

Does anyone know of a tool that would do this? Or the feasability (and cost)
of getting one written using Word Visual Basic?

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

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[Karen]

#3 below - you said you have "have worked out a tool that will hyperlink an
Index in a single Word document,"

Could you share what you've done to make that work? I'm trying to create an
Employee Online Guide where I work. The table of contents hyperlinking is
nice, but it's not an alphabetical listing like an index would be.

I'd love to hear what you've done...

Thanks,

Karen