Question

I am looking for a way to extract / scrape data from Word files into a database. Our corporate procedures have Minutes of Meetings with clients documented in MS Word files, mostly due to history and inertia.

I want to be able to pull the action items from these meeting minutes into a database so that we can access them from a web-interface, turn them into tasks and update them as they are completed.

Which is the best way to do this:

1. VBA macro from inside Word to create CSV and then upload to the DB?
2. VBA macro in Word with connection to DB (how does one connect to MySQL from VBA?)
3. Python script via win32com then upload to DB?

The last one is attractive to me as the web-interface is being built with Django, but I’ve never used win32com or tried scripting Word from python.

EDIT: I’ve started extracting the text with VBA because it makes it a little easier to deal with the Word Object Model. I am having a problem though – all the text is in Tables, and when I pull the strings out of the CELLS I want, I get a strange little box character at the end of each string. My code looks like:

sFile = 'D:\temp\output.txt' fnum = FreeFile Open sFile For Output As #fnum  num_rows = Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Rows.Count  For n = 1 To num_rows     Descr = Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Cell(n, 2).Range.Text     Assign = Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Cell(n, 3).Range.Text     Target = Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Cell(n, 4).Range.Text     If Target = '' Then         ExportText = ''     Else         ExportText = Descr & Chr(44) & Assign & Chr(44) & _             Target & Chr(13) & Chr(10)         Print #fnum, ExportText     End If Next n  Close #fnum 

What’s up with the little control character box? Is some kind of character code coming across from Word?

Answer 1

Word has a little marker thingy that it puts at the end of every cell of text in a table.

It is used just like an end-of-paragraph marker in paragraphs: to store the formatting for the entire paragraph.

Just use the Left() function to strip it out, i.e.

 Left(Target, Len(Target)-1)) 

By the way, instead of

 num_rows = Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Rows.Count  For n = 1 To num_rows       Descr = Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Cell(n, 2).Range.Text 

Try this:

 For Each row in Application.ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Rows       Descr = row.Cells(2).Range.Text