InfoPath Dev

Hi there,

We just got office 2007 so I have only been using infopath 07 for a couple of days. I have a project where we'd like to capture data from old word documents and put them in a flat file for loading (cvs,xls, access, whatever). The information is contained in a simple table structure. I read that one could convert the documents to infopath docs and the cells in the table would be imported into the infopath file as a form field or text box etc which will in turn make it easier to export that cell data to an excel spreadsheet. Once I have the form open in infopath I export to excel and the spreadsheet i get back only has these wierd drop downs with no data. I really just need a data dump into excel, each table (or a column of that table) representing a row. When I exported I checked off all of the custom options. As a test I created a table in word 07 - again, a very simple table, and imported it to infopath. When I treid to export to excel, the option to export all form data was disabled in the wizard.  I was attracted to inofpath b/c it appears to allow one to batch convert forms to excel. Please advise on any solutions. I'm open to any suggestions but I do not have any budget to buy more software.

Frustrated but grateful for any suggestions,

Tomiiko

Welcome to the forum.

You can use a Word document to create the template of a form. ie. a form which looks like the word document. For future data collection in InfoPath vs Word.  This is not the same as exporting data from existing Word documents.

You need to save your Word files in xml format.  Then you could open them all in one merged InfoPath document and try to export your data. That is probably the best option.

One of the problems with using Word for data collection is that your data is locked and not easy to get out.

In the future, InfoPath is a much better option for collecting data from users and storing it in XML or a database.

Hi Clay,

Thanks for the advise. i do plan to use infopath for the form template from now on. However, I am still having a problem with exporting. I'm using Office 07. I'll save the word doc as XML and import that into infopath. Once I go to export, I have no export options in the export wizard. The option that typically says "export to" in the file menu is also not there. I'm mystified b/c there's nothing special about these tables other than they were created in Word 2003. Am I missing some add-in needed to conver the XML docs to excel?

I am not sure exactly how you are doing it but you would want to create an InfoPath form which can display your Word data. Do you have this?

Once you have a couple of these saved then you should be able to merge them into one ideally.  Then you could export to Excel.

If you want to attach a sample to your post ( under the options tab) I could get a quote for you to get your data extracted.

I work at a University and unfortunately there is no budget to outsource this project, but thanks for the offer. I did create a template, inserting text boxes into the table cells where the data should be imported. When I try importing with this template open, it just opens as it has with no exporting options. When I try merging I get the following error:

"Microsoft Office InfoPath cannot merge data from the following form. This form has an unknown structure."The details read "The XML Schema specified for this form could not be identified". When I try choosing "Import form data" the wizard does not display any importer to use. If I could just figure out how to do one, I could do the lot. Perhaps it's something with the template I built. I've attached a dummy version of a simple table stucture that i'd like to import. I attached the xml b/c this site doesn' not allow .docx file extensions. I can attache the template I've created but I'll have to in another post as multiple attachements are disabled.