Thread: [Solved] convert text to tables
View Single Post
 
Old 03-17-2015, 06:11 AM
BruceM BruceM is offline Windows 7 64bit Office 2010 32bit
Advanced Beginner
 
Join Date: Feb 2015
Posts: 41
BruceM is on a distinguished road
Default

I suggested the pipe character because it is rarely used, in my experience, but as I mentioned it could be any character, or a string of characters as Andrew showed. There must be some character of combination of characters that will not be found in the source text.
Like Andrew, I would use Word to manipulate the text. After that it can be converted to a table as suggested. The table can then be copied to Excel. Or you could convert to a csv file, which can be opened directly with Access.
Let me build a little on Andrew's approach. You could replace paragraph marks (^p) with "zxzx". Then find "zxzx/" and convert it to a paragraph and a slash (^p/). Convert "zxzx" to a space, and convert four consecutive commas to a tab (^t). Now you can convert to the text to a table, using tab delimiters.

Instead of a tab you could do the above, except replace four commas with one comma. Save the result as a csv file, and open it in Excel.

All of this assumes the rest of the rows are in similar format, with a slash at the beginning of each new row. If not, the question remains how you know when you are at a new row.

In either a table cell or an Excel cell, word wrapping can take care of long lines without the need for line breaks.
Reply With Quote