Importing Table data from Word files

Sometimes you may have Table data inside of an Word document and you may want to import this to a Tracker and create several work item from that data. This especially can happen if, or makes sense:

• The Word document is generated from some other tool, and the generated data has tabular form
• Your organization may have used Word's tables instead of Excel because the description in Word allows richer formatting and images than Excel's.

In such cases you can import this tabular data from Word too using a new feature. This appears on the first page of the usual import wizard you can find on any Tracker like this:

Using Table import from Word

After you have uploaded the Word file choose the "Microsoft Word tables" import option on the wizard to import one of the Tables from a Word file. Also upload the Word file and click Next button.

The next step of the Wizard will show the familiar import page which is already seen when using Excel import

As typically the Word files may contain multiple tables (typically some intro tables, and one big table with most of the data) the wizard will offer you the list of all tables found in the Word document. You can choose between them using the "Importing part" select box at the top. After switching a table the page will reload and the preview will show the selected Table's data.

After selecting the Table everything continues as if this would be an Excel import, so first you should adjust the mapping between the Table's columns and the target Work Items' fields and then perform the import...

Features of the Word Table import

The Table import from Word has similar functionality than Excel import. Few things to note:

• Each cell found in the selected Word table is converted to wiki format, and then this wiki text is imported to the Work items as text
• Each cell in Word table can contain images, which are loaded and attached to the target Work item if that cell is mapped to some of the fields.
• Only top level tables can be loaded this way, but also nested tables will appear as wiki-tables during import. So for example if you import a Table which contains a cell which contains an table that inner/nested can be load to a "Description" field and will appear as table there too.

Known limitations

• Merged or split table cells are not supported yet (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Merge-or-split-cells-in-a-table-8b458deb-0fc5-4c8d-8d94-2d4da98193f8)
• Only top level tables supported because the nested tables will become wiki-tables during import
• The cells from Word tables are always converted and will appear as wiki text, this is not possible to load them as plain text (without formatting: like a bold text should not become "bold" during import.
• Table formatting, border, and styling from a Microsoft Office Table Design are not imported in Codebeamer. See the PTC Support article www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS420448 for detailed information.
• All import Table data is text.