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Blyech...
In between exchanges, I've been playing around with various ways of doing what I need to do in Excel. While I am less than thrilled at some of the default behavior in Excel, the fact remains that whoever chose Excel as a vehicle for a basically text document needs his head examined.
On the other hand, the reason Excel appears to have been chosen is the fact that each item in the table is associated with a number that is, ultimately, summed at intervals and at the bottom of the table. Word would have been an ideal vehicle for this document, except for the fact that it has no such capability, at least to the best of my knowledge.
To give you an idea of the scope of the problem I'm facing, I've got a document where one column consists of entries with 8-10 bullet points. These become 16-20 such points when translated. Moving one such cell from Word populates 16-20 rows of an Excel table.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no convenient way to merge these rows, the way one can merge those column rows in a Word table (actually, there is, but you lose the data in all but the top left cell, which defeats the purpose). Given the nature of a spreadsheet, I guess this inability makes sense.
I've tested a sample cell, replacing all carriage returns with the string "qq" to prevent Excel from splitting text among multiple rows, after which I do a search-and-replace, replacing "qq" with Alt-0010, which embeds the equivalent of an Alt-Enter into the text. It should work, and even though it's messy as heck, at least I seem to be avoiding having to do the translation over again from scratch.
Cheers...
On the other hand, the reason Excel appears to have been chosen is the fact that each item in the table is associated with a number that is, ultimately, summed at intervals and at the bottom of the table. Word would have been an ideal vehicle for this document, except for the fact that it has no such capability, at least to the best of my knowledge.
To give you an idea of the scope of the problem I'm facing, I've got a document where one column consists of entries with 8-10 bullet points. These become 16-20 such points when translated. Moving one such cell from Word populates 16-20 rows of an Excel table.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no convenient way to merge these rows, the way one can merge those column rows in a Word table (actually, there is, but you lose the data in all but the top left cell, which defeats the purpose). Given the nature of a spreadsheet, I guess this inability makes sense.
I've tested a sample cell, replacing all carriage returns with the string "qq" to prevent Excel from splitting text among multiple rows, after which I do a search-and-replace, replacing "qq" with Alt-0010, which embeds the equivalent of an Alt-Enter into the text. It should work, and even though it's messy as heck, at least I seem to be avoiding having to do the translation over again from scratch.
Cheers...