Transposing simple song sheets in Word format ?

[pcmangler]

Hi,

I'm trying to find an easy way to transpose simple song sheets in MS
Word format. e.g. say I have the following lines in a document:

E E7/G# A7 E E7/G# A7
I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around
E E7/G# A7 E
But I couldn't take the punishment, and had to settle down

Now, say I want to transpose it up by three semitones - the only way I
can guarantee that it will come out right is by manually editing each
line, changing each "E7/G#" entry to "G7/B" and so on - which is a very
laborious job.

I've tried using 'Search & Replace' in Word, but can easily end up
making a mess of it as if I replace all instances of "E7" with "G7",
and then need to replace a "G7" with "Bb", it's going to replace all
the 'new' "G7" entries just created in the previous 'Search & Replace'
pass as well !!

I've been experimenting with a little program called uke.exe that will
do roughly what I want, but only with plain text documents, and only
recognises a certain number of chord names, and it's not foolproof.

So.... has anyone got any ideas please ? !!!

Ideally, something like a Word macro maybe, that could intelligently
differentiate between lines with chords on them and lines with lyrics ?
A 'Search & Replace' function that can take multiple values and
replace in a single pass ? I don't know.

The problem with doing it in plain text is that when I re-import it
into word, all the formatting is lost, and the chords appear over the
wrong words, unless I stick to a fixed-space font which then looks
awful !

Any help would be greatly appreciated !

Cheers,

Kev.

 

[Zilbandy]

I'm trying to find an easy way to transpose simple song sheets in MS
Word format. e.g. say I have the following lines in a document:

E E7/G# A7 E E7/G# A7
I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around
E E7/G# A7 E
But I couldn't take the punishment, and had to settle down

Now, say I want to transpose it up by three semitones - the only way I
can guarantee that it will come out right is by manually editing each
line, changing each "E7/G#" entry to "G7/B" and so on - which is a very
laborious job.

I've tried using 'Search & Replace' in Word, but can easily end up
making a mess of it as if I replace all instances of "E7" with "G7",
and then need to replace a "G7" with "Bb", it's going to replace all
the 'new' "G7" entries just created in the previous 'Search & Replace'
pass as well !!

How about doing this, first. It's more work, but it should be
foolproof:

Change each ' E ' to ' E~ ' and then each ' E7/G# ' to ' E7~ ' and so
forth until each change that needs to be changed has the tilde symbol
in it. Then you can safely change each ' E7~ ' to ' G7 ' and so forth.
This is extra work, but it should do what you want.

If you wanted to take the time to write a macro that would change each
and every chord to a unique name with the tilde, or some other
character you're not likely to use normally, you could then run that
macro on any song sheet and you would at least have the first part of
the conversion done for you.

 

[pcmangler]

How about doing this, first. It's more work, but it should be
foolproof:

<snip>

Thanks for that - that would work. Off to give it a try now..

Cheers,

Kev.

 

[Kernix]

Don't use MS Word - use MS Excel. You can type text in a spreadsheet,
best to use the merge and center fucntion for your text. Use equations.
For example, type your first line, then above it enter an equation that
references a cell not in the print zone. If you want the first chord to
be a G7 type =B1&"7" in the cell. In cells B1, C1, D1 etc enter the
letters you want. What happens is that Excel goes to B1 and retrieves
that value and merges it with 7. So if you put a "G" in cell B1 you get
G7. Change the B1 value to "E" and you'll get E7.

Let me know if you have any questions about the equations.
Jim