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, 15 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 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

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.

Its okay if the lines do no get wrapped within the cell. If they use the next row of the same column that serves my purpose. I dont want the wrapped lines of seventh and eighth column to use the first column. I can also provide an end of line text delimiter like "end_of_line" and start of line delimiter like "start_of_line"

Can you please show this on the attachment I pasted below. I've added an extra column just to ensure there is no spill from seventh column to eighth column.

Attached Files

posted_on_forum_2.txt (743 Bytes, 11 views)

Using Andrew's suggestion for find and replace, with the amendments I described, I pasted the content twice into a Word document (twice because you provided only one row), then performed the find and replace steps as described. I used the option to replace four commas with one comma.

I then tried two options, both of which worked: Save the file as a text file, rename it as a csv file, and open with Excel; or create a table from text with commas as the separator, copy the table, and paste it into Excel.