HOW do I sort text that isn’t in Table or List form? OR, to extract specific text from paragraphs? I have been tasked to extract the names of books and authors from a huge Word document that is in paragraph format, not a list nor a table. The document was made by copying and pasting text from a website into a Word document. The Word document consists of paragraphs of short summaries of books and stories by many different authors. I don’t need the description of the works, just the name of the books and the authors. The plan is to create an index showing users where on the website a specific work may be found and to identify the authors whose work the site contains. Is there a way to do this other than by manually copying and pasting pertinent sections? Many thanks.

If the file has been prepared correctly, there will be separate styles for booknames and authors … even without that, there's a chance there might be some recognisable structure. Can you post a few sample entries?

Text pasted from web pages, or imported or scanned, is often formatted like junk. Web pages, though, may contain styles, maybe.

If I were the one constructing this document, I would have formatted the names using styles.

Try clicking on a book name or author and press Shift-F1 to display styles. At the bottom of the pane click on the option to show the style source. If there is a distinctive (character) style for these items, it will show at the top of the pane. If there is such a style, you can search for it and the Find will select the next set of text formatted using that style. You can record a macro to copy that text and find the next.

I was wondering whether any textual consistency, such as {name of author}. {name of book} might, just perhaps, make the content amenable to grep and a text editor. Then OP could add style tags, move the content back to Word and use search/replace to apply styles.

And hope the style is not also used for other (non-author) text...

Using Word since 1986 - ah, Word 3. Those were the days.