Disclaimer: My only prior experience with the VBA Editor has been minor editing of Word Macros after they have been recorded. I know I'm in over my head and badly in need help, and I don't think I can do what we need done without using VBA -- of course, please advise me if there is an easier way.

Our group is beginning to plan for a 30th high school reunion and the very first thing we must do is to update information about each of our 500+ classmates so we can effectively communicate with them.

he school gave us an Excel spreadsheet containing over 30 fields for information about our class members (not all of which contain data). Some of the alumni information has been updated, most has not, and we cannot be sure of the accuracy of anything other than each person's name at graduation. Of course, many female classmates' last names have changed, as has the address, phone #, etc. for almost everyone. So we need to verify and update the informaton for everyone.

We have e-mail addresses for a number of these people, each of whom we hope will have e-mail addresses for others. What we hope to do is send a form that can be (1) completed by the recipient and e-mailed back to us and (2) forwarded by that recipient to his/her e-mail contacts to be completed, returned to us, and again forwarded along to others. We wish to circulate a "form" so that, when returned, the data can more easily be extracted and reliably placed into a spreadsheet.

While it would be nice to be able to have something that would cause the imported data to automatically update the old data on the existing spreadsheet, we would be happy just to be able to pull the data from the forms and create a new spreadsheet with the correct fields.

It seemed to me that the most ubiquitous (other than pure text) file format is Word ( I don't think I can expect nearly as many people to have or use Excel, for example). So, I have created a Word Template to serve as a data collection form that will only allow the user to put data into specific fields. This is something we can e-mail. What I cannot figure out is:

1. How to automate getting to that data (either file by file, or from a group all at once) and

2. How to move that data into an Excel spreadsheet.

I can not imagine that someone has not already developed a way to accomplish this, but I do not even know where to go look. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have attached the form I created, in case that helps.

- Paul Dalton