MS Word Import tool ?

[Ian Mitchell]

I have a customer who needs a way of doing a 1-off import of a number of large MS Word documents into EA, and breaking them up into separate Packages, Requirements, Classes, Features etc. so they can then use EA to manage the data.
Does anyone know of any tools which might help them ?

What I had in mind was a 2-stage process.

• First they take the heading structure of the document and make it into the EA Package structure. Maybe they might then take the content under each heading and make it into a Linked Document under each EA Package. This would at least get everything into EA.
• They would then have to go through all the content, and highlight individual sentences/paragraphs, and make then into the relevant EA elements.

Has anyone written anything to do this? Has anyone any experience of doing his some other way?
Thanks

[qwerty]

I'd try DOORS. That's the only tool I know which can do such kind of work.

q.

[Sam Courtney]

Agree with Qwerty, this type of heavy, complex RM work is best accomplished in a tool like DOORS. We resell DOORS and provide consulting for the integration if you are interested.

[Ian Mitchell]

Thanks for the tips chaps, but.....DOORS?? Seriously??
This is the tool I spend my life trying to get people AWAY from!
Any suggestions which don't involve selling competitive (and expensive) products to my customer ?

They just want a 1-time migration from Word documents to EA. I'm sure SOMEONE must have done this before.

[qwerty]

I know that DOORS has stopped developing its "GUI" somewhere in the mid 90's. But to my knowledge it's one of the few tools doing that kind of job.

Of course you can script MS Word to do what you want. But maybe if it's a one-time task: send the job to India.

q.

[OpenIT Solutions]

The half way house i used for this was a modified version of Geerts excel imports script. My users had tables of requirements in Word documents. So i got them to paste the tables into my modified import script, which created packages and requirement objects.

[Eve]

I don't know of any tool already written.

With a quick search I did find the following link which gives you a start towards doing it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2005/05/25/how-can-i-extract-word-paragraphs-that-use-a-specific-style.aspx

It wouldn't take too much to modify that to use EA's automation interface to create packages from headings and requirements (or another type) from paragraphs.

[Ian Mitchell]

Thanks @SimonM - that's the direction I was thinking of, but I thought that the quickest way to get there was to see if someone had already done it.
I'm surprised nobody has, as it's a scenario which I come across quite a lot in the UK.
Ho Hum - back to the maze of twisty passages...

[qwerty]

You could make it a product :-)

q.

[jfzouain]

Hi

I have done all this but not using MS Word, but with MS Excel.
And it works great.

Regards

[Stefan Bolleininger]

Dear Jose,

would you share your scripting?

Dear Ian,
it would be a great value, which I tried once ago, but was left with the different headings and paragraph formats.

My intention was round-tripping:

1. Import from document to model
2. Generate a Report from your model
3. Edit it in Word
4. Re-Import the Document ...

Unfortunately I never finished it. - Lack of time..

Regards

Stefan

[jfzouain]

Hi Stefan

Do a search in EA Help -> CSV, Import

It tells you how to import from an excel file that was save as as a csv, it is very simple just create columns as the example, and voila import into EA. You have to copy or convert your word doc into excel columns.

[Nizam Mohamed]

Please check this...
http://www.sparxsystems.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1392617801

[Dermot]

Ian - for your first point see also this document library importer on the commnity site:
http://community.sparxsystems.com/community-resources/511-83importing-a-document-library-into-enterprise-architect