combine downloaded word docs from website?

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Sylvia - 22 Aug 2005 05:55 GMT

Hello,

This is a long shot, but I'm thinking you folks would probably have
some pointers for me.

On this website:

http://www.cityofbellevue.org/page.asp?view=7863

There's a set of links to months. If you click on one of the months
(say, August), you get a set of links to Microsoft Word doc files, 3
for each day of the month:

http://www.cityofbellevue.org/page.asp?view=38806

Is there a way to combine all of these docs into one document, then
sort by district? Would this be something I could do with vba?

thanks for any pointers!
Sylvia

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Jezebel - 22 Aug 2005 07:21 GMT

Opening and combining into one document is simple. Since the names are
predictable, you could write a loop that generates the file names, opens,
copies the content, and pastes into a new document --

Eg for May ---
pMonth = "05"
set pDoc1 = ActiveDocument
For pDay = 1 to 31 'Days in the month
for pShift = 1 to 3
pFileName =
http://www.cityofbellevue.org/departments/Police/files/Press_2005_" & _
pMonth & "_" & _
format(pDay, "00") & "_" & choose(pShift , "0600", "1400",
"2000") & ".doc"
set pDoc2 = Documents.Open(FileName:=pFileName, ReadOnly:=TRUE)
pDoc1.InsertAfter pDoc2.Range
pDoc2.Close SaveChanges:=FALSE
Next
Next

You'll need to add some error handling because I notice some files are
missing.

However, sorting by District is another kettle of fish altogether. The files
are not structured to make that easy. You need to parse the information and
organise it -- eg into a table or spreadsheet -- and then sort it. This is
several hours work for someone who knows what they're doing.

Separately, how does this information come to be on the web at all? -- since
by its own admission: "May contain confidential information. Any use of this
information must be based on BPD Policy 18.1" It appears to contain the
names of people arrested, including minors. Is it legal to publish this?

> Hello,
>
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
> thanks for any pointers!
> Sylvia

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Sylvia - 23 Aug 2005 17:15 GMT

Thanks very much for your informative reply. I'll try this.

We're actually not interested in the arrest records, just the crime
reports.

Sylvia

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