Hello, I have created a simple database for restaurant listings. The fields are Name, Address, Town/City, State, Zip Code, and Phone Number.

My listings are currently in .doc format from MS Word 2000. They are in single line form with the name with a dash(-) then the street address with a comma, then the town/city with a comma, then the state with space then the zip code with a comma, and then the phone number.

Here is an example of what all my listings look like:

Elkhorn Bar & Grille - 38750 Highway 82, Aspen, CO 81611, 970-925-1500

All my listings are categorized by state, so I have 50 different .doc files.

There are over 11,000 listings, so you can see that it would take me years to manually type them in to the database.

I am assuming that I need to create some kind of script that will enable these listings to be properly imported into the fields and that the - after the name of each listing and the commas after the other info in each listing will have to be in the script for everything to be imported into the proper fields.

Thanks in advance for any help with this, a simple step by step guide to creating this script would help me so much!!

You can join all of the files in Word, using the INSERT menu option, and selecting 'FILE...'.

Once you have created one file from the 50, save the file as 'TEXT ONLY'. Open the file in excel, and during the import wizard:

1. Set the original data type to 'delimited'

2. Set the delimiters to 'comma', and 'other', insert the dash.

Save the file as 'text (tab delimited)', then import it into your Fm db.

You could do a find and replace for the dash in word (find the dash, replace it with a comma), but if any of the restaurant names have a dash in them, it will be a problem.

The remark about the dash. When the separation between name and adress is " - " (note that there are spaces before and after the dash) you can replace this string for a comma. I assume that this string does not appear in the name.

Bert