It’s a frame up (Word 2000 and XP)

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Our office has received a large file of 132 pages which was originally created in Oracle and then converted to an RTF document in Word (don’t know the original Word version).

The document appears on screen as a series of frames containing the data that we need to use. It looks OK on screen and in print. However, in its present form there is not much we can do with the data that will keep it all together and in a usable standard format. We want to be able to pull it into XL eventually.

Copy and paste /special ends up as a mess. It is not possible to select a line or a page of text as a usable entity as everything gets hopelessly rearranged. If you remove frames the text appears in a different area of the page and the original layout between the different frames is scrambled.

Has anyone experienced this type of thing before and if so do they know what could be done to easily convert it into something useful.
TIA
Brian

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Your best bet would be to contact the originator of the document and to ask them to export the data not in report form, but as a data file (directly to Excel if possible, otherwise to a fixed width or delimited text file; Excel can import those).

If that is not possible, you’re probably out of luck. It depends on the way the text is distributed over the frames. I had a similar case recently. The sender informed us that the original data file had been lost, so they had had to scan a printout. The OCR software had made a mess of it, there was no discernable structure to the way text had been put into frames. Sometimes a line would begin like normal text, continue in a frame in the middle of a word, switch to another frame in the middle of another word, etc. We weren’t able to write a macro that extracted the data in a usable form. In the end, we had a secretary type in the data into a new file from a print; this was less work than cutting and pasting all those nasty bits and pieces.

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Sounds like the export from Oracle might have done no more than create page images and stuck in image in a frame.

You could try saving the doc as HTML, then clean up the HTML to get what you need.

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Sadly I have had to come to the same conclusion as Hans. I tried saving in different formats and copying and pasting but the document information was always askew. I couldn’t guarantee that the information we were dealing with was still linked properly so in the end I requested and got a replacement file in Excel format. Yipee. Now everything is as it should be. I shall put the original file on the back burner and maybe one day ……hmmm.

Thanks anyway for your advice guys.

Brian

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