OT Merging Word Documents

Not exactly *recommended* in my first post which pointed to a page which
also gave a link to Monkey Merge. In fact I had a look at both in demo
form as I thought I might fnd something similar useful.

My second post specifically pointed to Monkey Merge, which I have
actually acquired a licence for.

--

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
| Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest Yamaha WR250Z |
| Gilera GFR Moto Morini 2C/375 |
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Well, sort of, and yes, in that order. It's 'open' in that it's a
publicly available and published format, yes, but it's effetively a MS
standard, so they could change it if they wanterd to. Thankfully, it's
remained unchanged for at leat six years tha I know of.

It's either true or it's not, shirley?

Ahh, _really_ open, yes. RTF doesn't have as many manipulation tools
generally available, although there's a complete suite for SAS, wot I
wrote, out there somewhere. But it does allow an almost infinite
degree of formatting. I've not played so much with XML documents, but
I've a sneaky suspicion that there are things it's not very good at,
when it comes down to the fine detail of table formats.

--
_______
..'_/_|_\_'. Ace (brucedotrogers a.t rochedotcom)
\`\ | /`/ GSX-R1000K3 (slightly broken, currently missing)
`\\ | //' BOTAFOT#3, SbS#2, UKRMMA#13, DFV#8, SKA#2, IBB#10
`\|/`
`

 

yeah - I didn't see that originally.

 

XML - "It's the way of the future", as Howard Hughes might have said if
he was around now.

I really must make more effort to get my head round the concept.
--

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
| Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest Yamaha WR250Z |
| Gilera GFR Moto Morini 2C/375 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 

Genius.

 

oh sure, that works, but you need not to care about the formatting too
much (or not have documents with too much formatting in them in the
first place)

 

I like to think so. If you think that's good, wait til you see my plan
for making a cat-flap out of old razor blades. Revolutionary it is.

--
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www.MuddyStuff.co.uk
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'02 MV Senna '03 Tiger 955i '96 Tiger '79 Fantic Hiro 250

 

XML - "It's a way of making your data even bigger"

 

You got mail, and a macro.

 

Simple is best. Hat off to Krusty.

TBF, if all the documents are to the same format (as is likely to be the
case in sweller's scenario) it ought to do the job perfectly.

I just tried it on a mixed bag of simple 'letter' type documents and it
was OK.

Still think the merge options (breaks), filter options (file pattern,
date etc,) and the 'favourite' facility in Monkey Merge are worth the 10
quid.

--

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
| Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest Yamaha WR250Z |
| Gilera GFR Moto Morini 2C/375 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 

We aren't using ICL ME29s anymore though are we.

Got to go the XML way if into E-government (IMHO).
Convergence and interoperability innit.

--

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
| Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest Yamaha WR250Z |
| Gilera GFR Moto Morini 2C/375 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 

No, but we still need to move data around in efficient ways. XML is
great but it is not the great panacea that a lot of people think it
is.

I never want to go anywhere near e-GIF again if I have to.

 

Decide the order in which you want your documents to appear in the
master document.

Save all your documents as RTF files - to avoid confusion it might be
easier to call them a.rtf, b.rtf, c.rtf, etc.

Open up the first file using notepad. You'll see a load of computery
nonsense. Go to the end of the file, and delete the last curly bracket
} . Save the document

Open up the last document using notepad. Delete everything up to, but
not including, the second curly bracket { - probably something like
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1\deff0\stshfdbch0\stshfloch0\stshfhich0\stshfbi0\deflang1033\deflangfe1033

Open up all the other documents, and do both of the above tasks for
each.

At the DOS prompt, type copy a.rtf+b.rtf+c.rtf output.rtf

Open up output.rtf .

Realise that, while this works a treat, it might have been quicker
opening up all the documents and using copy/paste, but that this was
infinitely more satisfying.

Geeks would have this done in a flash with their text-editing weapon of
choice, but I suspect you're not armed with sed or Crimson Editor

 

Indeed, it can contain anything you want it to. Oddly enough I do
actually know a bit about XML too ;-)

But you misunderstand my point - for XML to have the universal
functionality of RTF would require a universal standard for all types
of formatting requirement. I'm not aware that such a standard exists
and even if it does it's certainly not univerally accepted and
implemented. I can't do a 'Save as XML' from Word, for instance.

--
_______
..'_/_|_\_'. Ace (brucedotrogers a.t rochedotcom)
\`\ | /`/ GSX-R1000K3 (slightly broken, currently missing)
`\\ | //' BOTAFOT#3, SbS#2, UKRMMA#13, DFV#8, SKA#2, IBB#10
`\|/`
`

 

<checks>

No, my desktop's still on 2002. There's an outstanding update which
I'll get on the laptop tomorrow, as it's currently being rebuilt.

I'll certainly be interested to look into it, as we currently have a
number of documents which need to be updated on unix as well as
windows, and rtf is the only satisfactory way I've found of doing this
up until now. But I'd be very (pleasantly) surprised if it supported,
by default, all the types of formatting I can think of.

Specifically, things like a table with varying height and width cells,
each of which may contain mutiple text items, formatted within the
cell, in different fonts, colours etc. This wasn't easy to achieve
programatically in RTF, although I got there in the end, so if XML can
do it all, it might be of some interest...

errr, whooosh.

--
_______
..'_/_|_\_'. Ace (brucedotrogers a.t rochedotcom)
\`\ | /`/ GSX-R1000K3 (slightly broken, currently missing)
`\\ | //' BOTAFOT#3, SbS#2, UKRMMA#13, DFV#8, SKA#2, IBB#10
`\|/`
`

 

You're lucky. I've come across an awful lot of people who want to use
it for absolutely everything within applications.

 

I'm dealing with very basic briefing notes, all based on the same
template. Works well for my purposes.

 

job done then - yay for ukrm.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Catman

Ah, you were going bust too then?

It's tough in the Independent IT Consultant sector, it seems.

I wonder why?

--
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Suzuki TS250 "The Africa Single" Yamaha Vmax Honda ST1100 wiv trailer

 

Quite the reverse. I am now paying someone else to do the leg work
while I go and do something far more interesting

Well, my company is a smidge different in that I never really regarded
myself as a consultant, but we offered a service to many companies.
Thing is, most small companies want to pay as little as possible and
expect the world in return. Oh well.




--
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