I am trying to extract some information out of the free text fields where details of maintenance activities are held in a CMMS with no fault code system. Does anyone have any experience of this analysis or could recommend any software which could be linked to MS Access/ Excel to do this?

Thanks.

To analyze free texts, extract all of them into a spreadsheet and then have to search by key words or code them in there before can do sorting. Examples for valves, joints & pipings if you do not tag them in cmms as objects, then have to analyse free texts. No shortcut the first time but the second time may be the first exercise can be repeatable.

Thanks for this unfortunately it was as I thought. There are some software about but I am now working through this on Excel whilst pursuading the company in question to get a decent taxonomy and equipment tagging system in place retrospectively.

Andy

What is the company's business? What software is avalable to analyze free texts or is it just search by keyword? Any links?

The program of http://www.dataflux.com/ can do what you ask.