Macro for Word 365 – adding quotations before and after text

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Hi everyone,

I am new to the world of macros – I’ve just learned about recording them and I’m pretty excited by the possibilities!

I have multiple reports to write, each of which requires me to take multiple short paragraphs and format them. I have created a macro that allows me to bold, italicise etc in one go, but is there any way that I can insert double quotation marks both before and after each comment? And ideally I’d like to find a way to make sure that there is a full-stop at the end of the paragraph/sentence.

E.g.

my manager needs to stop micromanaging me –> “My manager needs to stop micro-managing me.”

I am using Word 365 but hopefully this shouldn’t impact macro usage…right?

Any help here would be so greatly appreciated!

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How would Word identify where a comment starts/ends?

As for:

I have created a macro that allows me to bold, italicise etc in one go

The proper way to do this is by creating/modifying and applying an appropriate paragraph Style – no macros required.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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As Macropod implies, you should familiarize yourself with templates and styles first. Get those essential foundations working solidly before you start automating. Trying to automate poorly constructed documents is a frustrating time sink.

is there any way that I can insert double quotation marks both before and after each comment?

Assumption is each comment is in its own paragraph, and there are no other paragraphs in the document [if there are other non-comment paragraphs, you could use a separate doc to prep the comments].
Record a macro which globally replaces
^p
with
“^p”
That will cause double quotes at the beginning and end of each paragraph [^p is the code for the paragraph mark, I recommend you turn on viewing them, and other formatting marks, as your default].

a way to make sure that there is a full-stop at the end of the paragraph/sentence.

Similar global replace macro.
1. In case there are ellipses represented by three separate dots, first global replace
…
with
…
2. Global replace
^p
with
.^p
3. Global replace
..^p
with
.^p

Make sure you do each global replace more than once, to ensure that all instances are caught.

But I strongly advise getting to grips with templates and styles before doing much automation, they’re the key to reliable efficient and productive use of Word.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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