Querying the contents of Word documents.
May 26, 2005 9:55 AM   Subscribe

I've been given 700 Word documents some of which I'll need to edit, based on content. The values to be queried are stored in named fields in the documents.

So, for example, I might need to edit only the documents where FieldX >= 12. Is there a programmatical way of identifying the documents? My first thought was to try and parse the filename, field contents etc. into Excel and sort from there; is that feasible?. Any pointers gratefully received before I bite the bullet, sit down and open each file to inspect it manually. I don't expect a full solution, I have some SQL & PHP experience if that'll help, but just knowing it's possible will be useful. (WinXp, Office 2003).
posted by punilux to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
Are you looking to edit them en masse or are you just tring to find the ones that need to be edited?
posted by horsemuth at 10:31 AM on May 26, 2005


Best answer: You should be able to do all that using the version of VB that's built into Office. You'd basically be creating a moderately complicated macro--you can definitely open documents, scan fields, etc.

If you only had a couple of dozen docs to do, I'd say just do it manually, but it might be worth spending a few hours to learn how to do loops, file-handling, etc., in the stripped-down version of VB that's already there. Can definitely come in handy once you get a handle on it.
posted by LairBob at 10:32 AM on May 26, 2005


Response by poster: The latter, horsemuth. LairBob, you've confirmed what I already suspected, so I'll pop on the propeller beanie and set-to. Many thanks.
posted by punilux at 1:29 AM on May 27, 2005


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