"Tag and extract" text in Pages or Word

[Nermal]

I have no idea whether this is possible or not, but no harm in asking...

I have a large document which includes several quotes spoken by various people. What I'd like to be able to do is 'tag' each of those quotes with the name of the speaker (this will be a manual process). I'd then like to be able to tell Pages or Word "grab everything said by person A".

Does anyone know whether this is doable? I have a suspicion that I'll need Word rather than Pages, but happy to be proven wrong! I'm also open to suggestions for other apps if needed.

 

[sracer]

I have no idea whether this is possible or not, but no harm in asking...

I have a large document which includes several quotes spoken by various people. What I'd like to be able to do is 'tag' each of those quotes with the name of the speaker (this will be a manual process). I'd then like to be able to tell Pages or Word "grab everything said by person A".

Does anyone know whether this is doable? I have a suspicion that I'll need Word rather than Pages, but happy to be proven wrong! I'm also open to suggestions for other apps if needed.

Without using macros or some kind of script, I think one quick and dirty way to do it would be to:

1. tag the quotes (as you indicated) with the speaker's name being on the same line as the quote.
2. copy and paste the text to a spreadsheet (should result in one quote per row)
3. to grab everything said by person A, filter the sheet by rows that begin with Person A's name. If order doesn't matter, sort the rows. (that'll group all quotes by person)

I'm sure others will come up with better and more direct ways, but this might get some ideas flowing.

 

[Analog Kid]

I have no idea whether this is possible or not, but no harm in asking...

I have a large document which includes several quotes spoken by various people. What I'd like to be able to do is 'tag' each of those quotes with the name of the speaker (this will be a manual process). I'd then like to be able to tell Pages or Word "grab everything said by person A".

Does anyone know whether this is doable? I have a suspicion that I'll need Word rather than Pages, but happy to be proven wrong! I'm also open to suggestions for other apps if needed.

Sounds like a job for regular expressions?

 

[Nermal]

tag the quotes (as you indicated) with the speaker's name being on the same line as the quote

I was hoping to tag them 'behind the scenes' without affecting the layout of the original document. This is definitely possible in Word, although I don't know whether multiple runs of text can have the same tag. I'm also not sure what Word's name for these tags is, which doesn't help when trying to search for things

It's possible that I'll need to write some VBA to get this going.

Sounds like a job for regular expressions?