merge/split for one column in table (199 pages)

[kennedydottie]

HI all.

I have a word doc that began as a PDF. My ultimate goal was to convert it straight to excel but I never found any freeware that could completely help me and the online converters wouldn't do a file of this size (even though it's not that big). So, I finally converted it to word because that converter would work for the file. Now I'm working to get that to excel, which I have done, but there are formatting inconsistencies that I am trying to overcome.

I have a column that in some cases, has been parsed into two columns and in some cases, it has remained one. See below.

This is how it should be.
Address City State
123 Alphbet Street. Quincy Ma


In some cases, I am seeing the column being split.

Address City State
123 |Alphabet Street Quincy

I do see that there really are paragraph marks in the word table cells where the extra column (split) is being created, what I am unclear on is how to remove them for ALL the rows, I know I can do this manually, but it's 199 pages of manual effort I'd like to automate somehow. I tried to Merge the column, but it merges ALL rows into one table cell, which is not what I need.

Any ideas?

 

[xlhelp]

Myself, personally, I find it easier to clean up the data in MS Word, with a comma in between the fields I want; save it as a CSV file and open it up in Excel.

It's relatively pain free (if you know what you are doing).

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With the state of the world today, monkeys should get grossly insulted when humans claim to be their decendents

 

[kennedydottie]

Yeah, I just don't have the time to pour through 200 pages of this... I tried converting it all to text and looked at that, but either way it's a manual effort because there is no logic to when it's being broken out into antoher column and when it wasn't.

 

[fumei]

Which is exactly the problem. It is hard to automate things logically - all coding is some form of logic - when the situation does not have logic.

However, there may be in fact some logical structure that can be tested. I am unsure of what is exactly being described by your "extra" column. I am not following:

"I do see that there really are paragraph marks in the word table cells where the extra column (split) is being created"

Try again with:

Address City State
123 |Alphabet Street Quincy

but mark where the paragraph marks are with ^p. I am not following "split" for the above. Split where? Is there two columns in this example. Three? Where are the paragraph marks?


Gerry

 

[tf1]

Could you save a few pages of the doc and post it somewhere where we can download it to see if we can see a way to get it into a decent csv file?


Regards: Terry