Converting Word into Excel

M

Mon

Hi everyone:confused: !

I have a script in Word with the text, the stage directions and th
characters who are talking. I need to put all this info into Exce
without copying and pasting each section as it is very long and I nee
to be able to do this in very little time.
I need to have a column for the name of the character, another colum
for the spoken text and third column with the stage directions.

Does anyone know how I can to this without copying and pasting eac
character's speech one by one?

Thank you;) !!!
Mo
 
H

Hans

You could save your Word document as a Rich Text document
and then open it in Excel. When you do this, the Text
Import Wizard will appear and you have to choose how you
want to import your data (follow instructions on screen).
The result doesn't always look nice and you probably have
to make a number of manual adjustments.

regards,
Hans
 
H

Hank Scorpio

I have a script in Word with the text, the stage directions and the
characters who are talking. I need to put all this info into Excel
without copying and pasting each section as it is very long and I need
to be able to do this in very little time.
I need to have a column for the name of the character, another column
for the spoken text and third column with the stage directions.

Does anyone know how I can to this without copying and pasting each
character's speech one by one?
Click to expand...

There isn't really enough information there for anyone to help you.
The key question is "how is the script formatted in Word"? Is there
any way of distinguishing between those three categories of
information (formatting, for example) in the Word document?

Also you may have a problem with the "very long" part; if there are
more than 65536 lines of dialog. (However that's not insurmountable.)
 
M

Mon

Hi Hank,

The Word document is formatted in the following way:

I have a paragraph of scene directions, then underneath I have the nam
of the character, and beside the name (to the right) is the text tha
that particular character says.
That is all the formatting it has.

Is there any way of putting it into Excel like this or not?

Thanks,
Mo
 
H

Hank Scorpio

The Word document is formatted in the following way:

I have a paragraph of scene directions, then underneath I have the name
of the character, and beside the name (to the right) is the text that
that particular character says.
That is all the formatting it has.

Is there any way of putting it into Excel like this or not?
Click to expand...

Anything's possible... whether it would be worth the effort for a
one-off project like this is another matter. Certainly there's no way
that you can do it through something as simple as an import / export
process. It would require some custom VBA code.

My thinking would be that the code would need to look at each
paragraph in the Word document. It would also need to be told all of
the names of the characters. If a paragraph started with the name of a
character, then that paragraph would be parsed into character name and
dialog components and written to the relevant columns of an Excel
worksheet. Otherwise, it would be assumed to be a scene direction and
written into the third column.

However if it's anything like a normal script it would probably have
act and scene headings, and those would have to be factored into the
parsing process as well. In addition, I doubt that there's a scene
direction above EVERY character's line of dialog, so the program would
have to have enough smarts to allow for that in terms of incrementing
the row count.

I'd give you an example block of code if I didn't have to get up at 5
tomorrow morning, and if I have a moment I'll try to post one
tomorrow... but as I said it's questionable whether you'd get 100%
accuracy with it in any case.
 
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