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Excel - Bring Word Text to Excel for Easier Sorting - Episode 943

551 views · Published 4 February 2009 · 3:41 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: MrExcel.com · 2009 · Education

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Microsoft Excel Tutorial: Bring Word Text to Excel for Easier Sorting 

Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast! In today's episode, we'll be discussing a question that was sent in by one of our viewers - how to sort word paragraphs in Excel. This is a common issue that many users face when trying to organize data from Word into Excel. After some trial and error, I found a solution that I'm excited to share with you.

I had 23 pages of data in Word that needed to be sorted based on the name after the bullet point. However, I couldn't find a way to sort these two paragraphs together in Word. So, I decided to copy and paste the data into one column in Excel. This resulted in the function name in bold and the description in the next row. I knew I needed to find a way to sort this data, and that's when I turned to VBA.

In this episode, we'll be using a one-time use macro to quickly and easily sort our data. The macro will loop through rows 3 to 702 and check if column 4 (column D) is bold. If it is, then it will grab the function name and write it out to both the bold row and the next row. I also added an extra column to match the styles in Word - function name and function description. After running the code, we can see that our data is now sorted alphabetically by function.

But our work isn't done yet. We still need to get the data back into Word with the original styles. In tomorrow's episode, we'll cover how to do this. But for now, we can celebrate the fact that we were able to successfully sort our data using Excel. This is a great trick to keep in mind when dealing with multiple logical records for one record. Thank you for tuning in to this netcast from MrExcel. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell to stay updated on our latest episodes. See you next time!

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Table of Contents:
(00:00) Difficulty sorting data in Word
(00:35) Solution: copying data to Excel and using VBA
(01:03) Explanation of VBA code
(01:46) Adding a new column for style
(02:05) Sorting data in Excel
(02:56) Difficulty formatting data back into Word
(03:14) Clicking Like really helps the algorithm

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This video answers these common search terms:
Adding styles to Excel columns
Converting data from Excel back to Word
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Handling multiple logical records in Excel
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Running VBA code in Excel
Sorting data alphabetically in Excel
Sorting data in Word
Tips for working with data in Word and Excel
Using VBA to sort data in Excel

Join the MrExcel Message Board discussion about this video at https://www.mrexcel.com/board/threads/1152124/

Bill (me) asks... is there any way to sort paragraphs in Word? I still don't know the answer, but in Episode 943, I show you how to take the data to Excel, add a few new columns and successfully sort groups of records in Excel.

This video is the podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!

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