I have an interesting problem; I am hoping to automate extraction of
name, contact, and address information from hundreds of word documents
into a database or spreadsheet.  All the information is within the
first 15-20 lines of each document, below letterhead, and letter
header information (from, date, etc).  All the documents vary slightly
and do not use a template or standard layout.

Is there existing software or scripts, or some other means to pull
this data?  Any comments are appreciated!

Thanks!
 Steve

Mike,
  Both Word and Excel support a scripting language called VBA, which
is a form of Visual Basic.  You could automate this using VBA, which
is not too difficult for someone with programming or scripting
experience.  The main problem you will encounter is inconsistancies
between different documents.  For example, how would the script know
the difference between a name and an address.  Without seeing your
exact documents I can't really determine how difficult it would be. 
Hope that helps!

Joshua

Thanks Joshua

That is my backup plan, I am hoping for existing software as
programming such a script will take many hours.

Thanks! 
  Steve

Mail me two document sampls and mention the fields, have done thjis
stuff before, will see if i can work a very quick fix.

ANAND
artyfact_in@hotmail.com

Also try a programme called 80:20...I do not knwo whether it will work
though...but is worth a try.

ANAND

One method would be to use a utility such as catdoc
(http://www.ice.ru/~vitus/catdoc/) (for the Linux operating system) to
extract the text from the files, and then to pipe the output of that
through 'head' (a common utility included with most linux
distributions which will give you the first n lines of a file).  From
that point, you can either manually add the information to the
database, or you can use some kind of pattern matching tool such as
AAC (http://www.patrice.ch/en/computer/programs/aac/aac.html) to
identify phone numbers and addresses to some extent automatically, or
if you want to spend some money for a commercial product, (where they
may be able to help get you going),
http://www.vedit.com/office-tasks.htm may be of use.

Hope this helps!

hi  Steve,

There is a software which does exactly what you require 

It identifies all the contact infromation which you requre
its name is Address grabber to know further about the product
check the website
http://www.egrabber.com/addressgrabberdeluxe/addressgrabber_s.htm

They have also provided a 15 day free trial 
http://www.egrabber.com/addressgrabberdeluxe/trial.htm

Rgds,
sivakumar.

Email me a sample document, perhaps I can do it for you.

kochhw@intekom.co.za