Migrate MS Word table to a database

Question

Apologies in advance if this question is too elementary for this forum, but if so a referral to a more appropriate forum would be much appreciated. I have an extremely long Microsoft Word table, and it's starting to become obvious that it should have been done as a database. It's just going to keep on growing and I'm afraid it will crash someday. It only has four categories/columns, but unfortunately, within individual table cells there are often long text segments, paragraph breaks, etc. (I could simplify going forward but could not revise all the existing content.) Is there any way to import this critter into a database without retyping everything? If not, it's OK but I would like to know I can rule it out. If yes, would this be accomplish-able with free software like OpenOffice and if not what would you recommend? (I'm on a Mac so I don't think Access is an option?) I will be happy to (re-)learn database basics but unfortunately I can't justify it in the schedule right now unless I'm pretty sure I can use it for the above-described task. Thank you very much!

Answer 1

This is no elementary question. Here's what I suggest you do. You first need to export that long Word table to an easier and more database friendly container. Unless you really want to keep the data in there as datasource. You must understand that some of the information would be lost in the process. Since you are not a database guy, your Word file might have some information in form of color highlight, flags or notes that are bundle in a numeric column. That has to be translated using code OR you could update the Word file. You may not by a code guy either but you can you code from someone else. You can try searching Google for something like "export word table to CSV". It woud be VBA code. If you don't find anything, you can post a partial word file and I could help.

Answer 2

A Microsoft Word table can be copied into an Excel spreadsheet, and the software will automatically put the Word table cells into the Excel spreadsheet cells. Just copy the Word table and paste into an Excel sheet. I just tried this with Office 2007, and it worked. Not sure about other versions.

Once you have it in Excel, then you can make use of the elementary 'database' functions in Excel, or export to Access or some other software.