Reverse Mail Merge?

[eepok]

Oh, the trials of working with people who believe word documents are sufficient ways of storing data!

Background: The people with whom I work did a mail merge a long time ago and have been updating the resulting 80-page documents manually when they receive a change of address or when they need to change the letter. Yes, that means they scroll through each page and change a number.

This has just come to my attention when I was sent 5 of these 80-page documents and asked to take the addresses and put them in my existing contact database. They did NOT save the excel spreadsheets from the merge.

Problem: Is there an easier way of extracting the addresses from the merged documents than going page by page and deleting the letters then rearranging the resulting addresses in excel?

 

[KeithG]

Probably, how is the data formatted in the document?

 

[eepok]

Probably, how is the data formatted in the document?

Standard business letter format:

DATE

NAME
Dept
Sub-Dept
Street Address
City, State, Zip

Dear Name,

blah blah blah
blah blah blah

blah blah blah

Sincerely,



Sender
sender position

 

[eepok]

Update and summary of what I did since I couldn't find a silver-bullet solution:

The Find/Replace dialog in MS Word can find strings of characters only so long in length, so I took the first half of the first paragraph of the letter and copy/pasted it into the "Find" portion while I left the "Replace" portion blank. This deletes all instances of that character string. I did this for the rest of the letter body.

After that, I was left with a ton of Paragraph Symbols and Line Breaks and Manual Page breaks. I explored the find/replace dialog to see if there was a way of finding and replacing those also (with nothing). I found a drop down menu that allows you to input just those (and a few other things I've never heard of). I deleted all artificial page breaks, all line breaks, and all double-instances of the paragraph symbol (does this thing have a name?).

Currently, I have the following:

name
department
sub-department
street address
city, state, zip
<skipped line>
name
department
sub-department
street address
city, state, zip
<skipped line>
name
department
sub-department
street address
city, state, zip
<skipped line>

 

[KeithG]

Depending on skill level you should be able to do this with VBA. Can you post a couple pages of examples? You could make up fake data, I just need to see the document and I can make a procedure in VBA to extract the data.