New on the Word MVP FAQ Page

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Charles, I think this is great for you to do this. I must admit, I do not always go this site as often as I should. What I would like to encourage (suggest) is that maybe the keepers of Woody’s Lounge could be persuaded to set this thread you have established as a separate item itself, outside of the “WORD” discussion area…maybe call it “Word at MVP” or something similar. With this arrangement, there is little chance that your contribution would get lost in the Word discussion area.

Your thoughts? Others thoughts?

Ron M

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Very shortly the Lounge sofware is going to have a major upgrade. There will be a new personal ‘Control Panel’ where you will be able to mark and list your favorite threads such as this one. This coupled with the Search engine (just enter “Word MVP FAQ”) and our StarPost feature means there is little chance of not being able to find it.

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Thanks Eileen for your reply. I look forward to the upgrade. and a for the effort!

The reason I suggested a separate item is that like a lot of others, I am a bit lazy when it comes to chasing these things and having then all in one place rather than searching for them makes it easier…no problem…the ability to mark “favourite threads” will solve all this.

To Charles…you are right, it will bounce back to the front every time something is added and that serves another, useful purpose…a reminder to go check out the site, if I, or others, have not done so lately…bonus

Ron M

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Nice thought Ron, however, each time I add something it will move back to the front. I did put a link to it in the VB/VBA forum as well.

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I already did send Tom’s comments to Dave using the “mail to a friend” option.

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I’m sorry, I should have mentioned that I did. The WordBasic.Sendkeys idea is OK, but both it and plain old SendKeys ignore dialog boxes, and in general Sendkeys should only be used as a last resort. (I’ve had a few sendkeys macros in various vendors’ software run out of control on me.) One of my favorites blew away four folders in Windows 3.1 before I could hit CTRL+BREAK.

Remember the days when we created macros in WordPerfect, then a menu changed or something like that, and the macro didn’t have a clue that “whatever” was no longer 5 choices down.

FWIW

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I should have gone to the Microsoft Knowledgebase first, like I usually do. Check Microsoft Knowledgebase Article ID: Q240653 Adapt the code to VBA in Word and you’ll have both the ability to capture the entire desktop screen and the active window, without using sendkeys at all.

FWIW

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As noted in the aforementioned article:
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(Note that using Find and Replace is dramatically faster than cycling through the Paragraphs collection).

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Thanks for putting a figure on it, BAM.

Perhaps the best approach would be to use the MVPS approach for the bulk find/replace, and then to use Gary’s for the small number of leftover empty paras at the end of after empty tables.

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Thanks guys, for the feedback, and a big “whoops!” from me, for not having read Dave’s article closely enough (well, somehow missing that key sentence!).

All part of the learning experience, as my Mom often said (actually, she’s still around, she just doesn’t say it as often ).
Now, I wonder why the Find/Replace is so much faster? – probably something to do with Find/Replace working on strings, while the other method works through a collection, hmm…

Gary

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:-)….

Hi BAM,

Your post sent me back to conduct my own set of homemade time trials.
Sure enough, the full version from the MS MVP site did run faster, but not that meaningfully faster (at least on my machine):

120 pp document, about 2000 empty paragraph marks (consisting of a repeated series of two paragraphs with text, followed by one empty paragraph).
Results: while the quicker macro did run through this in 12 seconds, the slower (Al/Gary ) version ran through it in 19.

No point using a slower version in any case; just wanted to note that at least when tested here, the difference didn’t come out quite that large!

Gary

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Gary,

Mine came in at about halfway between your times and Bam’s.

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Geoff,

<>

– and that’s why you’re a moderator!

Seriously, something I’ve never thought about before, but I wonder if different processor type might account for the relative differences in the results seen – for what it’s worth mine is an AMD K6-2, 400 Mhz, 128 MB.

Gary

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No, that would make me a miderator.

And the reason I’m a moderator is that I was silly enough to volunteer when this was a tiny little board with 200 people on it .

My machine is 250MB, but I don’t know what processor speed. It was state-of-the-art 2-3 years ago, but hasn’t been touched since. Sorry, that doesn’t help your comparison much.

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Hi BAM

Thanks for your encouraging post.

I might actually get round to doing what you suggest — and actually impose my stuff on the MSMVP users! It might not happen for some time though, because as it is, even on the Lounge, I have sporadic bouts of posts.

Of late, after the excellent upgrade to the Lounge, reading the daily archive is how I find it most time-efficient to keep up. And by the time I read it, most posts have already been answered by WMVPs like you, with little I can add !

Rajesh H

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I regularly check the Word MVP FAQ “What’s New” page and am starting this thread to try to keep others up to date. I will post to it as I have time. The dates shown below are the dates that I added something to this post (not necessarily the date that the article was added to the MVP site).

I’ll add new pages directly to this post rather than add a reply. That way people won’t have to search quite as hard. I imagine that eventually the page will reach capacity and I’ll have to start a new one in a reply.

Note: I may not list every new addition to the FAQ. Sometimes, I just miss things. For that reason, you may want to bookmark and check the site yourself on a regular basis.

14 October 2001

How to cure Word’s List Numbering with a dose of VBA which isn’t yet the promised article but a great source for information anyway

Why is my “Blank Document” not blank?

Extracting a picture from an Image Control in a UserForm

Extracting a picture from an Image Control in a UserForm

De-selecting a Selected Item in a Single-Select Listbox

Creating a Splash Screen with a UserForm

Using the Erase statement to clear an array

How to make urls (and delimiters such as , /, : and @) wordwrap in Word {revised article)

earlier
2001 September 21
Nothing new on MVP site but the following are new or revised on my Word sites:
Basic Formatting in Word – added detail to the last section on cleaning up or resetting formatting.
Fields (draft page) – updated the keyboard shortcuts table to include Mac keys and also to group by key and by function.

2001 September 06 – revised articles

How to enable the spellchecker in a protected document (Now caters for user clicking on Cancel button and for a Word 97 bug that crashes Word if formfields in tables contain multiple paragraphs)

How to set the result of a text formfield using VBA, if the string is longer then 256 characters – revised

2001 August 17

I have a “Name” column which I want to split into “FirstName”, “LastName”, how can I do it? (revised)

2001 August 14

Finding and replacing characters using wildcards by Graham Mayor (w input from Klaus Linke)

How to convert the hyperlinks in a document to plain text – revised article

2001 July 26

Using a macro to replace text where ever it appears in a document including Headers, Footers, Textboxes, etc. by Doug Robbins

2001 July 23

Fixing the Cell Alignment Buttons on the Tables Toolbar in Word 2000+ by Dave Rado — changing from the 9 buttons that include paragraph formatting to the three that only include cell formatting – Word 97 style.

2001 July 18

Distributing your Macros to Other Users by Jonathon West – don’t think this is new but I just ran across it and think it is a nice addition to the toolkit.

2001 July 17

How to programmatically disable the Word 2000+

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How to do a screen capture using VBA by Lutz Gentkow, with a change by me.

It seems to me
WordBasic.SendKeys “{PRTSC}”
is much clearer than
WordBasic.SendKeys “%{1068}”

If Mr. Gentkow is trying to get ALT+PRINT SCRN to work on the active Window, and he is successful, I’d like to know. When using his code, I’m getting the entire desktop, not just the active Window. (That’s the reason I left out the % sign in my version of the code)

I used the WordBasic.SendKeys “{PRTSC}” successfully in Word 97 and Word 2000.

TomG

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Charles,
What a great idea. Many thanks for posting such useful FAQ’s. I found an answer about field codes that I had wanted for ages.
Good job.

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When I switch from Outline View to Normal View in Word 2000, the currently selected heading is not visible.
How to enable the spellchecker in a protected document (revised)
Remove all empty paragraphs from a document (revised)

Check what’s new on your own.

This message has now been incorporated in the beginning message.

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Thanks for these really helpful links, Charles.

Regarding removing all empty paragraphs in a document, I think something just like this came up in a discussion here recently – the following was my variation on a solution that was posted by Big Al:

Sub DeleteEmptyParas()
Dim aPara As Paragraph
For Each aPara In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
    If Len(aPara.Range) = 1 Then
        aPara.Range.Delete
    End If
Next aPara
End Sub

Besides being very economical, this approach has the benefit of being able to delete empty first and/or last paragraphs in a document and also empty paragraphs before or after tables. (It will not however do the “delete blank line at end of table cell” bit.)

It’s worth noting that deleting members of a collection, while looping through the collection, should be approached with caution (and the usual workaround is to step through the collection in reverse) – but in the case of the paragraphs collection, this seems to work fine.

Gary

PS: you’re welcome to forward this one to Dave Rado – it would nice to see a solution from the Lounge get credited on the Word MVP pages (and not just the other way ’round)!

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it would nice to see a solution from the Lounge get credited on the Word MVP pages (and not just the other way ’round)!

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Gary,

The author gets the credit, not the lounge.

See , which arose from this thread.

Sometimes though it pays not to joke around.

On the same subject, this post was taken seriously- Judith came from Boston especially (well, maybe not) and bought me a nice cold Aussie beer. Thanks Judith!

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>PS: you’re welcome to forward this one to Dave Rado – it would nice to see a solution from the Lounge get credited on the Word MVP pages (and not just the other way ’round)!

I think there are several things on the Lounge which I have not seen on the MVP Pages, like the macros for listing all fonts in the document and for inserting and placing Figures automatically (it was copied to the VBA Board here as well). Those might be forwarded as well!

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There are articles in Microsoft’s own Knowledgebase that give a solution to items not found at http://www.mvps.org/word or better solutions to some items found on http://www.mvps.org/word, as well as things found here not posted there.

FWIW

(A vendor’s Knowledgebase is the first place I look for solutions before using any third party “sites” including this one or http://www.mvps.org/word. Both Adobe and Microsoft have some good stuff in their knowledgebases.)

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What you have said, and what Charles Kenyon has said thereafter, are both unexceptionable. I was only looking at moving towards ensuring that the solutions unique to the Lounge get a wider audience, reciprocal to the intent clear from the Subject of this thread. After all, who else but the developers themselves are likely to know more about the defects and strengths of their products?

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With this in mind, I have credited the Lounge in the header of each of my FAQ pages and provided a link to both the Word and the VB/VBA forums. The link is below).

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Er – Chas … I just clicked on the Word FAQ link you gave (which works fine) but when I clicked on ‘click here to go to the list of questions’, it just came straight back to the front page – in fact, checking the link, it is linked to itself …!?

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Hi Beryl,

Thanks for pointing that out to me. I will fix it. The banner you clicked on appears on all pages in the FAQ so in the other 20 or so pages, it works fine, but on its own page, it gives us the classic infinite loop! I’ll change it so that it does go to the question list rather than just to the questions page.

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I agree that the knowledgebase is a good place to look. I personally trust the solutions on the MVPs site more, though. A prime example is their fix to the AutoCorrect backup macro from Microsoft. Also, they are more likely to tell you when a feature just doesn’t work.

This is not to say that the solutions posted here on the lounge are not very good as well — and the lounge has the advantage of being able to carry on a friendly, helpful conversation! – With smilies, yet!

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Post deleted by Charles Kenyon

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How to get the Rowspan and Colspan of a table cell using VBA by Klaus Linke

This has now been added to the initial post.

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Word Perfect to Word Converters (and Why None of Them Are Perfect)

This has now been put on the 1st post.

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Consider displaying posts on this thread in reverse chronological order!

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