Data Merge-how can I get underlines to carry over?

Question

In my database file (excel converted to text for import), I have a lot of items that have underlines.  Of course when converting to txt, the underlines dont carry over.  Is there some way around this other than manually re-adding the underlines after I do the completed merge?  This is a LOT of underlines!

Answer 1

As promised, a simple script. Select the entire column -- vertically -- with the original single words, and run the script. It will search-and-replace this word in the cell next door with Underline On. If there seems to be a problem, the offensive word and its row number are saved, and displayed after the script has ended, so you can check if everything went as planned. Possible problems it catches are: the word does not occur at all in the next cell, or it appears more than once (in the latter case, all occurrences are replaced, though).
Copy, paste into a plain text editor (Notepad or Textedit in plain text mode; or, safest option, Adobe's own ESTK Editor). Save into your User Scripts folder as, ehm, make up a good descriptive name will you? Just make sure to end it with .jsx
//DESCRIPTION: Select a column of cells, then run to underline each of these words in the next column
// A No Guarantees Production
// Jongware, 4-Jun-2010
if (app.selection.length == 0 || !(app.selection[0] instanceof Cell))
     alert ("No cells selected!");
     exit(0);
cells = app.selection[0].cells;
app.findTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences.underline = true;
app.findChangeTextOptions.caseSensitive = false;
app.findChangeTextOptions.wholeWord = true;
results = [];
for (c=0; c<cells.length; c++)
     if (cells[c].contents.length)
          app.findTextPreferences.findWhat = cells[c].contents;
          if (cells[0].parent.cells.nextItem(cells[c]).changeText().length != 1)
               results.push (cells[c].contents+" (row "+cells[c].parentRow.index+")");
if (results.length)
     alert ("Dubious result for: "+results.join ("; "));