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General discussion

Import Word documents in to Excel workbook and......

Jan 24, 2010 10:56AM PST

I am looking for a way to take Word documents and place them in an Excel workbook to start with. The workbook then needs to have an index where I can click links to take me to each specific document. Then I need to have a page that has regularly updated information on it that when I edit a cell on that page it updates across several of the documents. I then need to be able to transfer the workbook to other computers with the links and everything else staying intact.

I have been playing around with this for several months now off and on. The closest I got was keeping the documents in Word and using paste special. This worked almost perfect. I could edit one cell in Excel and have a signature block update across 47 different Word documents. Except when I transferred the workbook to another computer, all of the paste special links were broken. Apparently the links are stored on the original computer and can't be transferred.

I also tried cutting and pasting each line of the Word documents into cells in Excel and all of that. Needless to say, way too time consuming. Also the Word documents need to follow a regulation that states proper spacing and whatnot, which there was no way to be 100% sure of using this method.

I'm really racking my brain on this one and if anyone has anything else at all that is worth a try or could tweak this in any way at least that might help, please let me know.

Discussion is locked

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No real help from me, but
Jan 27, 2010 8:09PM PST

one thought I had was the linking.

If the 'other' computer does not have the original word.docs in the same location as on the original computer, that might be why the paste special fails.

I'm not sure about this, but try keeping the word.docs and this excel file in the same folder, and using absolute links instead of relative links.

Absolute links link directly to the document, but relative links take a 'path' as specified. EG; document in My Docs/Test and Excel file in My Docs/Excel, and the relative link would be ..\Test\documentname.doc

But with all the files in the same folder, the link would just be to documentname.doc.

Like I said, just a thought.

Mark

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Try to use Data > Get External Data > Import Text File
Jan 28, 2010 9:54AM PST

Hi,

What you can do in Excel is to select Data > Get External Data > Import Text File. Then, choose Delimited as the data type and use tab to separate text into fields in your Word document, as your delimiter.
This is required to place the info into appropriate Excel cells.

Let me play with it again and I will try to write a better explanation.

May be it will help you...

Albert