I am afraid that there is usually no such thing as "quick help" when it comes to using Text Explorer. I am currently writing a two-day course as an introduction to this methodology with the Text Explorer platform. (It will premier at the JMP Discovery Summit in October at SAS Headquarters in Cary, NC.) There simply is so many aspects to
Because the data is somewhat structured, even if it is messy, you might first try using the Cols > Recode command. This facility is very powerful. You can learn about it and examine many examples in Help > Books > Using JMP. This way might still take a lot of work due to the size of the data set and the creativity of the engineers but it is likely to be the most straight-forward approach.
If Recode is not satisfactory or successful, then Text Explorer might be useful for this problem. Please read the chapter about Text Explorer first in Help > Books > Basic Analysis. I expect that the default method of tokenizing the unstructured (regular expressions) will be the most useful in this case. I would try using 1 to 5 characters as the minimum number for a word because the initial processing is fast and then you should be able to quickly compare the term list. This parameter can save you a lot of work later but it can eliminate terms that might have meaning.
Once you have selected the best value for this parameter, examine the term list. (First click the red triangle at the top and select Display Options > Show Term and Phrase Options to reveal buttons for common commands.) The most frequent and the least frequent terms are usually uninformative because they are either common to most texts or so rarely found. Now carefully examine the list and select all of the forms for the same term. (For example, "r", "rt", and "right".) Click Recode and then enter the designation that you want to use (e.g., "right").If you find anything in the term list that is simply uninformative junk, select it and click Add Stop Word. All this work is just cleaning up the term list. Now example the phrase list. Some combinations mean more than the individual words, like "monkey bars." Select these phrases and click Add Phrase to use it as a term.
I suggest that you save your work as a table script. Also, see the platform menu commands for the Show Stop Words and Show Recodes. These commands provide options about the 'scope' of your customizations. This way all your effort will be saved!
I am honestly not trying to make a big deal out of this problem. I wish that I could give you quick help. But this job is a lot of work and it involves many careful, thoughtful decisions that cannot be automated.
