Revised XLS Excel spreadsheet and DOC Word document files for the new automated log-to-tag merging have been uploaded to the Tagging Items page.

If you have NOT yet started entering items, please delete the previous files you downloaded and re-download from the links at the top of the Tagging Items page.

While assisting with file debugging across different versions of Excel and Word, a couple minor changes became apparent…

1. Some versions of Word do NOT ask for a data range, such as A10:G210, but instead ask for a named range. So the new XLS file has a named range of MergeArea. In these versions of Word, such as the 2007 version, you will need to select for MergeArea in the list of data sources to choose from.
2. We found that the 2007 version of Word also does not correctly format numeric fields when merging from Excel to Word. Prices that were shown in Excel as $2.00 appeared in Word as $2 and those entered as $1.50 would show up as $1.5. So, no trailing zeros after the decimals. We fixed that by defining formatting switches behind the scenes for the price field in the Word doc and it now appears to work as desired.

IF you have already entered log items, but not yet merged, you may want to re-download just the DOC file IF you find encounter the “bug” issues in #’s 1&2 above when you merge. There is a do-it-yourself fix with Excel, if you’re brave to tackle, that will create a named range for merging…

1. Close your existing Word file if you have it open and do not save if prompted.
2. Delete the old Word file and re-download the new one from the Tagging Items page
3. Unprotect the Excel spreadsheet. This option is in the toolbar ribbon at the top of Excel, believed under the Data settings.
4. Click the ‘B’ column header and drag to the left as if to select the currently invisible column ‘A’
5. Right-click anywhere along column ‘B’ and select Unhide (note this will be greyed out if you failed to unprotect the spreadsheet) …column ‘A’ should now be visible
6. Click on cell A10, hold and drag through cell G210 to select the entire log table
7. Right-click anywhere on the selected area and choose to Name the Range/Space
8. Enter a name of ‘MergeArea’ and click Ok to save it
9. You can right click column ‘A’ if you like and Hide it again
10. You can opt to re-protect the spreadsheet for easy tab entry of additional items
11. Be sure to save the spreadsheet, open Word and merge as described at the top of this post