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1.
Know a little about “search-and-replace”
for special characters – like paragraph markers, tab markers, pipes, etc. 2.
Remove any columns or other formatting features in the original list. 3.
Scroll through the list to find any things that would need cleaning up
– like extra lines between list items, missing data elements, alignment
issues, etc. Clean-up can be done
manually or with “search-and-replace” strategies. 4.
One of the important things to note is that your list should be
consistently organized – that is, the same types of information in the same
order in each record, the same
number of lines or items within
each record, and the same number of lines separating
records. For example, a good list (or
and easy list with which to work) might have name, address, city, state, zip
on five lines with a blank line between each person’s information. If one record leaves out the city, for
example, that will cause everything after it to be out of place. 5.
Determine what things are to be kept in the list – such as the division
between each person’s record and the next person’s record. That division is usually two paragraph
markers (if there is a blank line between records). 6.
Replace two paragraph markers with one pipe character. This will make the file look really funny –
but it will keep a separator (the “pipe”) between the records. 7.
Then, replace each remaining paragraph marker with a tab marker. The tab marker is used because Word and
Excel will recognize the tab marker as a column divider in a table or a
worksheet. Now, your list will look
like one long paragraph. 8.
Now, replace all the pipe characters with one paragraph marker. Your list should look a little more
familiar now because each record will be on one line and the items in each
record will be separated by tab markers. 9.
Click Edit/Select All to highlight the entire list. 10. Click Table/Convert/Text to Table,
which opens the Convert Text to Table dialog box (see figure below). 11. The dialog box guesses at the
number of columns and rows, based on the highlighted text and on the “Separate
text at” option at the bottom of the dialog box. 12. Click the Tab option to tell Word
that your list has tabs separating the information within each record or line. This may cause the
estimated number of columns to change, based on the number of tabs it finds
in each line. Leave everything else
unchanged. 13. Click the OK button. Your text will now be in a highlighted
table. Click anywhere in the document
to turn off the highlight. 14. Highlight the first row of the
table. Click Table/Insert/Rows Above.
Click anywhere to turn off highlight.
Type the column headers in the blank row – using short, one-word
headers (for example, LastName, SSN, NextGradeLevel, etc.). 15. This conversion is not perfect,
most of the time, because there can be stray tab markers or stray paragraph
markers in some records; so, scroll through the table to be sure things look
as they should. Some of the things to
look for include the following: a. Empty cells: Usually indicates missing data. b. Information in wrong column: Highlight, drag-and-drop to right column. c. Two records in same row: Highlight that row, Table/Insert/Rows Below,
highlight information to be moved, drag-and-drop into blank row. d. Unexpected data: Highlight, delete
or drag-and-drop in another cell; then drag-and-drop what should be in
correct cells. 16. Save the
file. It can now be used as a mail
merge table or for whatever other purpose you have. |
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Revised 9/20/2006 |
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