Yes, you can easily copy text from Word and paste into Excel. If you
use tables in Word, just select the text you want, copy then go to
Excel and paste.

If you do not use a table in Word, you should separate things that you
want to keep in different columns (e.g. Species name, Author, Size,
Locality, etc.) by using a tab (the key on the left hand side of the
keyboard). Once you have formatted your text in Word, just select,
copy, then paste it into Excel.

Excel is more useful to keep this type of information, because it is
easy to sort by different things, while in Word you can sort by
paragraph (unless you have a table, but Excel still gives you more
control). And you can also copy from Excel and paste back into Word.

If you want even more control and a more sophisticated system, you can
use MS Access (or other relational database software). Again, you can
import information from Excel and link different tables. For example
you could have a table for taxonomy, one for locality, one for
references, etc. You can get as complex as you want.

For a good introduction to using databases to organize a shell
collection, see Rosenberg (2006) in The Mollusks: A guide to their
study, collection and preservation (see below).

For a professional database software that was developed specifically
for museum collections, check out Specify Software, a free, very
powerful (but complicated for the novice) solution for large
collections. Individuals can use it, but the developers only support
institutional collections. The site is at:
http://specifysoftware.org/


Cheers, Fabio

-------------------

Rosenberg, G. 2006. Computerizing shell collection. Pp. 101-110 in C.
F. Sturm, T.A. Pearce, and A. Valdes, eds., The Mollusks: A Guide to
Their Study, Collection, and Preservation.
Universal Publishers, Inc., Boca Raton, Florida.

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