Help! Need to reformat over 1000 *plain text* Word docs quickly

[wieland -at- marinbrillante -dot- com]

Greetings all. I have been a off and on lurker for the past two years, but
never posted until now. (Please don't bite!)

Maybe someone can help me with this question? It?s more technical editing
than technical writing, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

I?m working as a contractor on a conglomerate?s website, in the midst of a
major redesign and development. One of the conglomerate?s major
contractors has configured the Vignette content management system for
editing and developing the website, but it?s still fairly unwieldy. It?s
several pages worth of scroll bars to enter material on 20 different
templates.

Meanwhile, over a thousand Word documents have been created by the
copyediting team, each document matching up with a web page to be entered
and edited by another team of contractors.

Unfortunately, most of the data to be pasted and converted into Vignette
appears on the Word document in the wrong order, in plain text, and in a
non-intuitive fashion. For instance, the title text might appear on page
four of 50 Word documents, but appear as the first input box in the
corresponding Vignette template. On the other hand, the featured graphic
appears as the third listing in some Word documents, but appears as the
fortieth input box in Vignette. This is going to mean lots of wasted
minutes hunting and pecking, and using the scroll bars back and forth in
Word and Vignette, when the material is brought into the content
management system.

What?s more, each unique component of information (for instance, the title
of the page, the featured graphic, the terms of use box, etc.) is listed
plain text in Word. No fields! And while most templates only have about
5-15 pieces of information to be entered in, each template lists between
50 and 60 text and file entry boxes, again, in non-intuitive order.

Since everyone on this list taught me the best way to format my Word
resume with styles (grin) I?m wondering if anyone has any ideas that would
allow us to change the order of the data so that the workflow would be
easier.

What we need is some sort of system where batches of these Word documents
can be reorganized. Each piece on the page needs to appear in the order
corresponding to the content management system?s entry template used. In
other words, if the template for one page says, ?enter graphic name first,
title second,? the Word document could be reformatted to list the graphic
name first, then the title second.

Any suggestions, please? If we can?t find a way to do this more simply,
without spending a lot of time and money, I?m going to have to edit over
1000 documents individually in Word, before they get entered into the
website.

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