Importing Large Sized MS Office Word 2007 Tables

[Guest]

Hello,

Once again I am stuck; hopefully some experienced and helpful FM people can give me some pointers.

I am using FM 9 in WinXP and MS Office Word 2007. You know, the one that saves documents as .docx.

I get these documents from Engineers in a Word doc format that in some cases have very large tables that I need to import into FM. I have tried to import these tables as a file, as a CSV, but nothing seems to work well. I keep having problems with each method I try such that the tweaks required to make the import work are not worth it and I may as well start copying and pasting each cell.

I have also searched the forums to see if there was a post concering this type of thing, but maybe I am not searching on the right thing because I could not find a post that was similar to what I am going through.

What is the best method to import a 200 row, 6 column table from MS Office Word 2007 into FM9? The end result will need to have a header row and be editable as an FM 9 table.

Thanks for the help!

Erin

[Guest]

Erin, as you've found, importing Word tables can be quite a challenge because there are so many ways that the two applications have different capabilities that the import filter just can't handle them. Plus, it often leaves hidden Word "junk codes" in the table in FM which can severely mangle one's sanity later on. And, the .docx file spec is newer than the FM9 filters, so ...

The very best way to get clean import of Word tables is to use Rick Quatro's TableCleaner import:

http://www.frameexpert.com/plugins/index.htm

It's absolutely worth its weight in gold.

[Guest]

Hi Sheila,

Thanks for the tip. I got TableCleaner from the very helpful Rick Quatro and got it installed.

I see that there are some very useful features in this utility, however, I have not been able to discern the best way to import that table.

Do you have any tips or help on this?

Thanks for helping clueless me on this topic!

Erin

[Guest]

Update!!

My Goodness, this utility makes just the process of importing the table easier!

I just tried from the top again, where I imported the file as a Word 2007 doc, and told it to override the formatting and remember the formatting of current tables in the document, and lo and behold it imported almost perfectly!

Thanks for the tip, and to anyone else having FM table issues, TableCleaner is a huge help!

Erin