deef is a data extractor for electronic forms, compatible with Microsoft Word
files with name ending .docx and/or .docm, i.e. compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 and later.
It is a work in progress. Please log any issues in this project. For any other queries drop me an email.
It allows you to load and extract form field data from a batch of .docx and/or .docm files
which contain certain legacy electronic form fields:
- Text Form Fields
- Check Box Form Fields
- Drop-Down Form Fields
See illustration for where to find these in the Word "ribbon".
See also this helpful YouTube clip for more information on using legacy form fields in Microsoft Word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCjVKZcXMP0
The questionnaire needs to be "protected" before use; otherwise the fields can be overwritten. You first need to make the Developer tab visible on the Ribbon as shown below, using Word Options:
Then you can protect the document thus:
You don’t need to set a password (just leave the password fields blank and click Ok).
Finally save the form.
Limitation: Text Form Field data extracted may include other text in the same paragraph as the content control, so it is safest to use a table to structure your questionnaire and to put each content control in a separate cell, without any following text in the same cell.
Data can be copied to the clipboard or downloaded from the app as CSV or Microsoft Excel files.
The following packages must be installed:
data.tableDTshinyXMLxml2
You can install all dependencies with:
install.packages(c('data.table', 'DT', 'shiny', 'XML', 'xml2'), dependencies = TRUE)You can easily run the app on your own machine with a single command if you have R, RStudio and the above packages installed.
shiny::runUrl('https://github.com/prcleary/deef/archive/refs/heads/master.zip')You can also use the extraction function in your own code - see https://gist.github.com/prcleary/c7f4dcbd9226c491ee53161ad7f88cef.
You can also run it in a Docker container - see enclosed Dockerfile.
TODO
- Rebuild based on Shiny modules to make it extensible
- Use a better-looking framework such as [
shiny.fluent](https://appsilon.github.io/shiny.fluent/index.html - Make the app available online via UKHSA OpenShift