At work, we have asked our clients to fill out a questionnaire; the format we sent it to them in is MS Word forms. To make matters even more complicated, a lot of the data is entered via tickboxes, so a straight copy-paste of the field copies only the labels, not which the client selected.
So now, when we want to get data out of it? Not so easy.
A sample screenshot of the blank survey:
It’s a Microsoft Word table. Note that “b) Answer” can be either a checkbox or a free text field, depending on the question.
I would like to extract the information from the Word docs into something more usable, ideally without manually copy-pasting every individual value. Problem is, I don’t know what’s possible. This is the sort of thing I could probably do fairly easily in MS Excel, but adding it as Word makes it more complicated.
Probably the eventual table will have roughly this structure:
Client | Category | Question No. | Question Text | Answer | Comment | Compliance
Tools I have available to me: Word, Excel, Access, and SQL Server Management Studio. It will likely be sent to the database eventually, but getting it as far as Access/Excel is sufficient midstep if that’s possible.
Can this be done in any even somewhat automated fashion? Or am I stuck reentering the data from scratch?
I wound up using a modified version of the scripts offered here – most notably Tim’s answer that loops through all tables in the document. To handle the checkboxes, I swapped the copy line for the function from this page, which turns checked and unchecked checkboxes into “true”s and “false”s respectively.