Not sure if Word is the right forum. I use Office 2013. I have a delimited file. four consecutive commas is the column delimiter.
The first 7 columns are only 30 characters in length, the other two columns contains many lines, they also contain carriage return and line feed.
I was not able to import it to Excel,Libre Calc,Rons Editor,csved(let me know if I can add to this list). By that I mean that I wanted the cells in the last two columns, the eighth and the ninth column to wrap lines as and when there is a CRLF. So this did not work because CRLFs are treated as next row in spreadsheets.
Now I want to convert text pasted in word to table. I am using Landscape mode since the eight and ninth column are like(almost) an A4 page themselves.
This option-convert text to table is greyed out.
Help me out please.
THanks in advance

We need to see the input text file to suggest a way of solving this.

You need to explain how the process can decide when a new row needs to be created. If any cells can contain crlf then there needs to be a macro or some other automated process to transfer this information up to the preceding row.

It may be possible to do without a macro but without seeing a significant portion of the text file, we have no way of making a meaningful suggestion.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Please use this attachment. THere are multiple such rows. THis is just one such row from the large text file I have.

Attached Files

posted_on_forum.txt (743 Bytes, 17 views)

I looked at the attachment, although on my screen it still indicates 0 views.

My general approach would be to replace crlf with the pipe character (|) before the import (it rarely appears in text, so it is my go-to delimiter, but another character could be used). After the import that character could be replaced with crlf.
The thing I find myself wondering is how you would distinguish between crlf in the text you supplied, and crlf that would start the next row.
BTW, a trick for getting a quick block of text if Word: in any Word document type =rand() and press Enter. Put a number in the parentheses for a longer chunk of text.

Yes the issue you say you are wondering about is the main issue.
Another issue that I faced is Excel spills data to the next column automatically.
So, if my eighth and ninth row exceeds certain length next column is used. And I cannot use pipe as the delimiter since this data is from scripts that are being searched. Shell scripts which contain many such characters like dolar, hash etc.

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.

I would do this in Word to avoid the issue of Excel spilling over.

You didn't give us much of a view of your dataset but assuming each record actually starts with "/" then it would be simple to do a search and replace series and then to convert it all to a table.

Find "^p" and replace with "zxzx"
Find "zxzx/" and replace with "^p/"
Find ",,,," and replace with "^t"
Now convert to table with tab delimiters.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia