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Breaking down a large Word document for sharing
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 1, 2009 at 07:11 PM
The concept of what I am need to do seems simple enough, yet for the life of me I am unable to think of a tool to do it. I am surprised myself that I haven’t needed to do something like this before.
Here’s the deal. I have a 150+ page document describing a large number of project tasks my team are working on. The document has become too cumbersome to move around, especially since several people may need to update their specific tasks concurrently.
So my idea is to break the document down to small units, each describing a single task. The question is: is there some tool to do this automatically?
Most tasks take up a single page, but some take more. I wouldn’t mind doing manually the long ones. I also wouldn’t mind if my imaginary tool (for example, a Word macro) needed some kind of separator to mark the start of each new section.
But with all the time and money I have invested in information managers, I hate to think I will have to do the whole process by hand. Also, I am quite certain I will want to do this in the future again, so I would happily invest in a tool that facilitates such tasks; then there’s CRIMP as an additional incentive..
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 1, 2009 at 07:51 PM
Hi, Alexander,
If I correctly interpreting what you are looking for, I think you will find that Zoot can do this just fine. It will work especially well if each of the new extracted documents already start with the same text. For instance, if the start of each task has the text “Task: XXXXX” where “XXXXX” is the variable. If this is the case, just use the file import wizard in Zoot (accessible via the import option of the file menu). After selecting the file you want to import (and it works with .doc files), select “Import delimited file (other)” and set Task: as the extract delimiter. Then pick the database in which you want to import the files. Then determine whether you want to use an existing folder or create a new one to hold the imported items. After you click “finish” a dialog box that allows you to set the extract delimiter (in this case Task:) and a subject delimiter, can be the same delimiter or another. Then click OK. It’s like magic! And, if you’ve got fields that end in a colon, you can now create columns for viewing your information in a table. It’s quite brilliant, really.
If you don’t have a common delimiter at the front of each of the sections you want to extract, you’ll have to go in and add something. Any unusual text string will do… a series of periods or xxxx’s, whatever.
Hope that helps.
Steve
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 1, 2009 at 07:54 PM
BTW, I haven’t tried this with Zoot 6 yet, and if you use Zoot 5, of course, you will lose your formatting.
Steve
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 1, 2009 at 08:31 PM
Steve, thanks; I very much appreciate the quick reply.
Interestingly I considered Zoot which I own, but immediately rejected it because I need the formatting (which includes tables, images and the like).
However, your post reminded me that Zoot 6 works supports RTF. I have not yet tried the Beta, but coincidentally Tom posted the link in the Zoot forum today, so I might give it a try. (In better times I would have spent the week-end trying out software to do such a repetitive task, but I am under way too much pressure from deadlines at this point).
Thanks again,
Alexander
P.S. To whoever has additional ideas to propose: please keep the ideas coming!
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 1, 2009 at 09:01 PM
Alexander,
I just tried to do this kind of import in Zoot 6, but apparently the function is not yet activated. There is a file menu item for importing, and it allows you to select a file to import, but nothing happens after that. I am using the latest version of the beta.
It doesn’t look like MyInfo can do this either, I’m afraid.
Steve