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Ira Jacobson wondered: <<I am about to receive Visio files that have
served as manuals. No, not charts, but lots of formatted text in
rectangles where the borders are not visible. There are also some
charts in between the paragraphs. One of my tasks will be to convert
these files to MS Word files. Is there any simple way to do this?>>
I've never used Visio, but given that it's now a Microsoft product,
here's something you can try that works with many other MS programs and
even some from other manufacturers: Save the file as a Web page or
export it to HTML. Often, this produces a nicely formatted* Web page
with a bunch of GIF or similar graphics neatly bundled into a graphics
directory.
* "Nice" is relative, of course. Microsoft produces often-appalling
HTML code from a purist's standpoint, but once you've got the tagged
text, it's easy to clean up in Word using the search and replace
function to swap the HTML styles for Word's own styles. If tables are
used in the layout (likely), use Table-->Convert table to text to
extract the text and convert it into regular paragraph text.
In terms of the graphics, if the GIF format won't meet your needs and
you still have the original Visio files, you can use Visio to re-save
the graphics in a more appropriate format.
Please report back to techwr-l if this works. Someone else may thank
you for this knowledge in the future!
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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