Hi Mary,
How difficult it is depends on how consistently they were entered into
Word.
If each label is one cell in a Word table, and every label contains
exactly the same fields - e.g.
Name
Company
Address
City State Zip
things aren't too bad (see below).
If the data isn't absolutely consistent, e.g.
Name
Address
City, State Zip
Name
Company
Department
Address
City State Zip
Name
Company
Address
PostalCode City
Country
things get much nastier. If the labels are in more than one column and
the columns are achieved with tabs and spaces, it's usually simpler to
re-type the document or use specialist software - e.g. Monarch - to
convert it to a format Access can handle.
For a well-formed Word document, the general idea is, working in Word:
1) Rearrange the columns in the table (put the right hand column at the
bottom of the first column and so on until it's a tall one-column table.
2) Regularise the data so that every label has the same number of lines
with corresponding items on the same line in every label (blank lines
for missing items). Sometimes it's simpler to move all the international
labels (or other unusual ones) to another WOrd documenet and enter them
into Access manually.
3) Use Edit|Replace to replace all ^p (paragraph marks) with ^t (tab
characters). This changes
Name
Address
City State Zip
to
Name<tab>Address<tab>City State Zip
getting each record onto one line. If you're happy with pattern-matching
searches in Word, replace the spaces in City State Zip with tabs too.
4) Select the entire table and convert to text.
5) Replace ^p^p with ^p to get rid of any blank lines.
6) Save the result as a text file.
7) Import the text file into Access.
8) Tidy up further as necessary (e.g. using update queries to split City
State Zip into separate fields.
