Software needed

B4nt3rB0t

I was wondering if anyone here knew of a application that could take 100's of word documents and reformat them into a single style, so that combinations of them could be put together as needed, in this case to form tour itineraries! Any advice would be great!

The Corinthian

B4nt3rB0t wrote: »

I was wondering if anyone here knew of a application that could take 100's of word documents and reformat them into a single style, so that combinations of them could be put together as needed, in this case to form tour itineraries! Any advice would be great!

Sounds like a job for a macro, TBH.

B4nt3rB0t

Yes i have a macro set up now thank you, would you by any chance know of a better way to combine multiple documents into one then just copying and pasting?

Aimead

Yeah…the formatting of the existing docs would need to be fairly consistent for a macro to be possible.

OP – can you describe the layout of the source word docs so we can get an idea of what is or is not possible?

Aimead

B4nt3rB0t wrote: »

...would you by any chance know of a better way to combine multiple documents into one then just copying and pasting?

There should be an option to insert another word doc(s) somewhere in the options.

B4nt3rB0t

Ok so the normal format of the docs would be title, text, subtitles, the odd pic.
I have a macro now which changes all the text to normal black size 9 arial, 1.5 spacing, whilst keeping the pictures in place. this is great, however i will then have to go through every document, and fix the titles, subtitles, spaces etc

Aimead

That’s the issue. For a macro to work it needs ‘hooks’. A ‘hook’ is some property of the text (eg: font size, bolding, underlined, etc.) that will allow the macro to determine what to do with it.

If your source docs don’t have consistent formatting then there isn’t any simple way to get a macro to know what is a title, a subtitle, etc..

The Corinthian

Aimead wrote: »

Yeah…the formatting of the existing docs would need to be fairly consistent for a macro to be possible.

Would it? It's been a good few years since I wrote a macro for anything, but from the OP's requirements I would surmise that simply copying / reading the unformulated text then combining it into a single document is essentially what he's looking for.

zagmund

Depending on the length of the documents, I think good old fashioned elbow grease may be your best bet, possibly combined with a macro once you get some sort of standardisation in place.

I would open a document, select-all, then remove all formatting (can be automated). Then select the first line and set that to the style you want (also can be automated, assuming the first line is the title). Then I would run through the document manually identifying subtitles (which will only be a handful presumably) and applying the relevant style. It should only take a minute or two per document unless you have massive documents.

Once I have the hang of that I would get some coffee, some jaffa cakes and some thumping techno and repeat this over and over and over on each document.

First of all though, I would make sure the styles are defined as I want them. The default styles are normally OK, but you can customise them. If mention of styles is new to you then go a quick Google - you don't want to be manually setting font size, indentation, etc . . . for each piece of text - just select the text and select "Title 1" or whatever style you want.

z

Aimead

The Corinthian wrote: »

Would it? It's been a good few years since I wrote a macro for anything, but from the OP's requirements I would surmise that simply copying / reading the unformulated text then combining it into a single document is essentially what he's looking for.

I’m going by comments like this “this is great, however i will then have to go through every document, and fix the titles, subtitles, spaces etc”.

Combining them can be done with Insert->Object->Documents pretty quickly, but getting the formatting constant with no hooks for the macro to use sounds tricky. And I say that as someone who has had to similar tasks like this way too often.

B4nt3rB0t

zagmund wrote: »

Once I have the hang of that I would get some coffee, some jaffa cakes and some thumping techno and repeat this over and over and over on each document.
z

Thanks for all the help guys, i think Zagmund has the right idea with the techno and such! i'll get back to work!

gctest50

B4nt3rB0t wrote: »

I was wondering if anyone here knew of a application that could take 100's of word documents and reformat them into a single style, so that combinations of them could be put together as needed, in this case to form tour itineraries! Any advice would be great!

you could make a little website with a map n stuff for yourself

then when you hover over the destinations n stops it'd show more info. with option "add to itinerary" - it'd be like any other shopping cart yoke

it could show a list of recent itineraries - so your tours have a bit of variety

link the yoke to a weather thingy and make it present desinations more suitable for wet weather first in the list and so on

it (should) much better - you could add new destinations from anywhere


.

B4nt3rB0t

Gctest, a good idea actually, but not exactly what im looking for at the moment! currently im looking for a better way to combine multiple word segments into a solid itinerary based on a customers specifications, i have all the segments made, however im also reformatting them currently!

Aimead

zagmund wrote: »

If mention of styles is new to you then go a quick Google - you don't want to be manually setting font size, indentation, etc . . . for each piece of text - just select the text and select "Title 1" or whatever style you want.

This is great advice. If you have 200 titles all using the same style and you edit the underlying style then WAM! – all 200 titles are automatically changed to the new formatting. Over the years this has saved me 100’s of hours.

The other advantage is that, going forward, styles are an easy hook to use in macros if you need to do a bulk edit.

Aimead

One other suggestion that may or may not be useful depending on your particular use case. This was originally for helping out some transition year students but it may apply here. They needed to do up activity packs for each student, but the problem was that each student was doing a different array of activities. Student A might be doing computing, tourism, woodworking, etc. while student B might be doing computing, business, art, etc. The idea was an activity sheet would be done up and customised for each subject, around 40 or so iirc, and an intro sheet and a summary sheet. Each activity sheet, as well as the intro sheet and summary sheet, were a separate Word doc.

So if, say, a student needed a pack with the intro sheet, <insert list of subjects> and the summary sheet all they needed to do was ctrl-select the required sheets, right-click and choose print. The default printer was set to PDF (PDF creator is good freeware for this), and the whole thing was basically a quick way to generate a customised PDF for any given student.

Might be useful.

The Corinthian

Aimead wrote: »

I’m going by comments like this “this is great, however i will then have to go through every document, and fix the titles, subtitles, spaces etc”.

True, but how did you know he was going to post that, as what I responded to by you (#4) was posted before he said the above (#6)?

B4nt3rB0t

Do you know how i would apply a hook to a specific type of text? also is there any way of applying a macro to multiple documents at the same time?

beauf

The default Word template attaches to every document by default. You don't don't want this as it has a ton of different style and changing it can have weird knock on effects.

Create a new template that has only the styles you want in it. Then attach it to all documents you have. This will mean they all have the styles only. You might have to edit the docs manually to correct where the styles get assigned incorrectly.

You could do a complex macro to analyse all the styles and apply them correctly(or mostly correct). But that's a very big project, needing very good VBA skills.

Anyway once you have all the docs the same style. Copying and pasting from one doc to another (with the same styles) should be easy. You could create a master DTP template using text boxes and word art shapes that holds the content in specific layout. So you could copy and paste into these boxes. Or use a table layout.

You could then create a fancy menu in this master template that looks up these other docs and inserts what you select into the master document. But again these needs decent VBA programming skills. I've done projects like this in the past but they were biggish projects. Effectively an rapid authoring system built on Word. Thats probably a few steps beyond what you were thinking of.

The key to word is master the styles and templates and attaching them to documents (documents and templates are different document types).

Aimead

The Corinthian wrote: »

True, but how did you know he was going to post that, as what I responded to by you (#4) was posted before he said the above (#6)?

If you’ve done this task on more than a few occasions you tend to recognise it, so I’ll chalk that up to experience. I’m old enough to remember having to do stacks of editing and find&replaces on webpages before CSS became a thing, so I know just how tedious the OP’s task is.

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B4nt3rB0t wrote: »

Do you know how i would apply a hook to a specific type of text?

If you have applied a style to any text you can reference it in the macro using the ‘.Style’ selector. You have to do that in VB though, so if you were hoping to do a record macro you’re out of luck.

also is there any way of applying a macro to multiple documents at the same time?

You could do it one at a time in a macro. It only takes a fraction of a second for a macro to do its business (assuming a simple enough macro). You can tell it to open documents with the ‘Documents.Open’ selector.

croo

B4nt3rB0t wrote: »

Do you know how i would apply a hook to a specific type of text? also is there any way of applying a macro to multiple documents at the same time?

you should lookup Styles... this is the quickest, most efficient, way to manage formatting within word documents.