Database from Word.doc

September 7, 2011 9:16 AM

How to make a database from word doc?

I have 32 pages of email addresses, not in table form, on an MS Word doc. What do I do to import these into an Access database? Must I put each address into its own line and then convert into a table?

posted by Ideefixe to computers & internet (7 answers total)

If you can get them into excel in some orderly way you can import that excel document as a table easily enough.
posted by wobh at 9:23 AM on September 7, 2011

Are the addresses only separated by spaces or by commas or semicolons? If it's a character (or maybe even a space), you could do a find and replace all to add a return between addresses and then copy to Excel.
posted by mattbucher at 9:25 AM on September 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

Are they space-delimited at least?
copy, paste into a text editor, find/replace the spaces for line breaks. Once each address is on its own line, copy/paste into Excel, save as CSV or whatever, import.
posted by misterbrandt at 9:25 AM on September 7, 2011

What separates one email address from another in your word doc? Spaces, commas, periods, semicolons? You'll need to massage the data into some sort of semi-regular form before you can import it. It will be easiest if you can get one address per line.

What if you find/replace all the spaces to carriage returns? You may end up with some garbage, like blank lines, but thats easy enough to deal with. For example, to get rid of the blank lines, just sort the text and then select and delete the chunk of blank lines.
posted by Good Brain at 9:28 AM on September 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

I usually do a bunch of find/replace things here to get the data into a way that I can use "convert table to text" in word. So if the email addresses are all by themselves on a line, you're set. If they're all lumped together and separated by commas or something, you can do a find/replace for a comma and replace it with a hard return [which is ^p in the word syntax] and then you'll have them all on one line. If you have names and email addresses, you can search for spaces and do some find/replace to make the spaces between the email addresses turn into commas or tabs or something that text-to-table will understand. Can you explain a little bit more about what the formatting of your current document looks like?
posted by jessamyn at 9:28 AM on September 7, 2011 [2 favorites]

They're separated by commas--I think I can do the hard return replace.

The document is like this

A's list
[e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]

and so on for 32 pages.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:34 AM on September 7, 2011

Hard return worked! Thanks very much!
posted by Ideefixe at 9:35 AM on September 7, 2011