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Notice how two paragraph marks exist between each record. If your last record doesn't show tow, you might want to add a line at the end. We'll substitute a unique character as a record delimiter. I like to use the tilde ~ sign, but you can use any uncommon character. Be careful not to use a character that appears in your list. 3. Go to the top of your document. (Ctrl+Home) 4. From the Edit menu, select Find 5. Click the Replace tab 6. Click the More button at the bottom. Your dialog will now show additional options.
7. Click the Special button. 8. Select Paragraph Mark from the pop up menu. Repeat this step. 9. Enter in the symbol you wish to use for your record delimiter such as a tilde. Your Find and Replace dialog should look similar to the one below.
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10. Click Replace All. 11. Click Close. Microsoft Word will give you a count of how many replacements it made. Don't worry that your formatting looks off and various lines look combined.
1. Go to the top of your document. 2. From the Edit menu, select Replace. 3. Your Find and Replace dialog will have your previous values. Remove one of the paragraph marks sets in the Find what: textbox. 4. In the Replace with: textbox, clear out the tilde and enter a comma. 5. Click Replace All 6. Click Close.
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The last part is to import our Microsoft Word text file into Excel. 1. Open Excel 2. From the File menu, select Open 3. In the Open dialog, change the Files of Type: entry to Text Files 4. Point to your .txt file. 5. Click Open 6. The Text Import Wizard should start. Keep the default values and click Next. 7. In Step 2, change your Delimiter from Tab to Comma. The screen should adjust to show the fields in columns. 8. In Step 3, you can change the data format for each column or click Finish to accept General format.
Final Tweaks
Chances are you will want to do some minor tweaking. As example, you probably want to add column labels. Also, if you have US addresses, you may want to split the last column that has the State and Zip code combined. You may also want to split the name column into first and last names. In our example, this is easy as a space separates the first and last name or the state and zip code. To parse a column into multiple columns, 1. Highlight your column 2. From the Data menu, select Text to Columns 3. Click the Next button on the Convert Text to Columns Wizard 4. In the Delimiters box for Step 2, select Space 5. Click Next 6. Define your data format. (Note: For zip codes, you may want to change the data format to Text if you have zip codes starting with 0.) While these steps may not work exactly for your list, they should provide the basis for creating the records in Microsoft Word. Your list may be slightly different or include additional items such as email addresses. Either way, you could use similar steps to create a document that Microsoft Excel can interpret. In Part 2, we will use tables to accomplish a similar result. Converting Word Docs to Excel Part 2
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