I have been struggling for a few days to copy some text information from a moderately large Excel spreadsheet - it has 1200 + rows and the columns go from A to BO - using Word's mail merge function. I first discovered the joy of mail merge when I was creating vignettes from an Excel data frame I made using R. I used R to randomly order category levels and printed the options to Excel. Then I added some stem wording in Word, and was able to end up with what looked like a paragraph of text but was really a fairly complex multiple regression equation with a lot of categorical predictor variables. Once I started to do mixed methods secondary analysis with certain datasets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I began copying and pasting narrative data from Excel into Word to improve my ability to read and apply qualitative coding processes. Then one day - and I do not know why this idea suddenly came into my mind - I realized that I could also use mail merge to print the information from the cells I wanted, into a series of Word documents. I did this over the summer in bundles of 100 with no real problems. I was working in 100s because I wanted to give data to my student research assistant incrementally. However, earlier this week when I tried to print the content from just 3 columns of all 1200 + rows, I immediately got error messages, and only a portion of the cases actually printed (not in order, unfortunately). I also got a lot of this: I had been going through a slow process of scanning each page, identifying these passages, and copying in the correct text. Also because the cases did not print entirely in order - there were gaps early on and in the middle, I had to cross check case numbers against the source file and highlight the missing ones. These characters occurred in around 10% of cases, so clearly both of these processes were time consuming. I also found other strange looking characters I had to repair. I was starting to get really frustrated - frankly it was the inability of the mail merge to handle more than about 100 rows at a time, and not to keep those in order, that I found more frustrating than the messed up text - but I noticed I had a CSV version - that I was using for frequency analysis in R - and I thought I'd try it out. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all cases copied over and there were no passages of characters or strangely formatted words. I still found that punctuation was a challenge: but these are easy to fix using find and replace. Typically the problems occur with 's; 't; 'm; and quotation marks.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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