MS Office, Excel question

[mitgrimes]

Now that I'm just buzzing along entering song titles into Excel, I hit a snag. I typed in the first 3 of 22 sheets (of pin feed titles) and then shifted to OCR. I then added some 50 sheets or more using OCR on music albums not in the pin feed sheets.
Here's the snag: If I want to find a song in my combined list, I click on edit, find, and enter a search word. If I type in the search word, Excel only finds matching words in the first 3 typed-in sheets. If I highlight the same word in the OCR area, copy it and paste it to the find box, it will only find matching words in the OCR sheets.
Why?

[Trudy]

After a little Googling and reading -- I can only offer that Excel 'sees' the typed and OCR'd differently -- as you could already tell. Have you tried selecting all the text and copying to a new sheet and formatting it all at the same time? Somehow -- you need to identify the OCR 'tag' and remove it. There are also several different kinds of OCR -- maybe read about the differences and try again -- but only 1 page to see if it works.
Hope someone else has a better idea.

[mitgrimes]

I think I figured out what was going on. When I tried to "sort" the excel file, I got this error messsage: This operation requires the merged cells to be identically sized. My first reaction was, "What is it trying to tell me?" I didn't think I had merged anything, but realized that editing and then copying could be termed merging.
Trudy, thank you for your take on copying. I slept on the problem last night, and when I woke up, my brain told me to set up a new worksheet with the desired column widths and then copy & paste from the old file to the new file.
I'll try to remember to let you know if it works.

[mitgrimes]

A new thought: I have a listing that I did in 1982 of the sheet music I had at that time. That listing, however is on striped pin feed paper. The ink has faded over the years to the point where the OCR can't pick the text up in the green stripe area. It treated it as a blank area. So I tried to "paint bucket" the stripe out in Photoshop, but that was a real PITA! I can type a page faster than that, and it didn't do well in the OCR anyway. If I can get a searchable data base, I'll simply type song titles, book and page numbers into that DB, or maybe just say THWI because the 1982 list is alphabetized already. It just would be nice to get rid of it and have it in one file on the computer.

[mitgrimes]

I punched a lot of buttons on the Format heading that came up. Somewhere in there, I found "Merge." I clicked it and lost the Book Title column. I played around with the sort for quite awhile. finally got it to work.
Phew!

[Trudy]

Just a thought for the old pin feed list. Try scanning one sheet - using a photo editing program - 'auto correct' the image - convert it to grayscale - print - and then try the OCR program. Worth a shot. Let us know how it went.