http://norman.walsh.name/2007/03/03/conversion 10 18 2007-03-03T17:16:55-05:00 $Date: 2007-03-03 17:53:20 -0500 (Sat, 03 Mar 2007) $ Norman Walsh 2007 Norman Walsh It doesn't matter how many steps it takes as long as it's fun, right? Start with a Word document containing names and addresses in a three-up, label-ready format. Open that document with OpenOffice and save it as a OpenOffice Text document. Unzip that. Now you have XML. Pretty-print content.xml. Peek at it. Fairly reasonable XML, in fact. Craft a 25 line XSLT stylesheet to extract the names and addresses and store them in CSV format. Cheer for RegEx support in XSLT 2.0. Fix a few irregularities in the XML with Emacs. Iterate until done. Open the CSV file with the OpenOffice and save it as an Excel spreadsheet. Now you have a “database” of names and addresses. I'm not quite sure why that was the desired format, but it only took about ten minutes and didn't require rekeying any data. I call that a win.