Replies

Ok. What you want is for Word NOT to create a numbered list if you do that.

In that case, go into the Word options, look for AutoCorrect, and look at the Autoformat As you Type tab or section. Uncheck the option to automatically create lists.

You can then do manual numbering of lists.

OR, if you want automatic numbering that follows your preferred formatting, you have to set up a list style. There is a button in the Home tab that looks like a single-level list. Click that button and create the list style as you want it. You can do this by selecting one of the standard list styles and changing it to match your needs. Then if Word lists don’t look the way you want, you can select the list (all of it) in the doc, and use that button to apply the list style you want.

Yes, I put the Document Properties command on the QAT – but it only gives access to the standard properties, not the custom properties which is what I need.

I’ll go investigate the content control approach and think about the macro to a dropdown idea.

Thanks!

– Jessica

After more research, I’ve decided to use this inelegant approach:

Sub InsertADocPropertyField()
SendKeys “{d 3}”
Dialogs(wdDialogInsertField).Show
End Sub

Since it doesn’t have to run without a person at the keyboard, I don’t need error handling. And if the number of field names starting with D changes, I’ll still end up close enough to the right spot in the list of document properties with a lot fewer keypresses than I needed before.

Maybe the next version of Office will have a version of the toolbar button to insert a doc property that supports custom properties as well as the built-ins.

If anybody has a better idea for more elegant code, please let me know.

Thanks,

Jessica

Thanks. I knew there had to be something better than my brute force slogging available, but not where to look.

As you can guess, I don’t program much these days and learned years ago in a language that was highly procedural and didn’t do much smart string processing.

Thank you; I’ll try this out for the next long poem I work on.

I ended up doing an amateurish macro which applies the line numbers in the format required to the selection. Have to select each chapter separately, and assume that no chapter has more than 999 lines. The assumption is correct.

I couldn’t find a numeric format that displayed a space if there was no digit, rather than a 0 or nothing. Is there one that I didn’t find? If so, I could dispense with the ugly left padding case statement and padstring thing.

Sub addLineNumbers()
Dim oPrg As Paragraph
Dim padstring As String
Dim prgNum As Long ‘ the paragraph number
Dim numSpaces As Long ‘ the number of spaces leading, if there are any
padstring = ” ” ‘ single digit line numbers need two spaces left padding

For Each oPrg In Selection.Range.Paragraphs
prgNum = prgNum + 1
numSpaces = 0
Select Case prgNum
Case 10 ‘ two-digit line numbers need one space left padding
padstring = ” ”
Case 100
padstring = “”
End Select

If prgNum Mod 5 = 0 Then
If oPrg.Range.Characters(1) = ” ” Then
numSpaces = numSpaces + 1
While oPrg.Range.Characters(numSpaces + 1) = ” ”
numSpaces = numSpaces + 1
Wend
oPrg.Range.InsertBefore padstring & prgNum & String(numSpaces, ” “)
Else
oPrg.Range.InsertBefore padstring & prgNum & String(3, ” “)
End If
Else
oPrg.Range.InsertBefore ” ”
End If

Next

End Sub

– Jessica

Thanks. I always forget about the Object Browser.

Recreating the comment resets the date to the present one, of course. I’ve got the alternate method working. They have to select the new comment reference first, but it does check to make sure it is a usable one.

– Jessica

Thanks. I searched but didn’t find the Revisions property.

Got it – it never occurred to me that Word would relate the selection to the position within the long string of characters that makes up each story. Obvious in retrospect of course.

Thanks yet again.

And my author, the test team, thank you too although they don’t know it.

– Jessica

Thanks for confirming. I replace with “HardReturnXXX” in case I’m doing more than one replacement activity in a single document massaging session.

Thanks – of course this makes sense, but I am not sure what format the start and end positions get stored in. The Word object model is so convoluted.

Can you point me to an example of how the end position could be stored? It’s probably obvious to everybody but me.

– Jessica, still a novice.

Sorry to be so confusing. I want to start a new row on the paragraph break (Enter, I guess – shows as a pilcrow) but NOT on the manual line break (shift-enter).

For the moment I am doing a text replace of all instances of SHIFT-ENTER to some unusual text, then doing the table conversion, then replacing the replacement text with the manual line break character.

Thanks,

Jessica

Thanks. Who would have thought something so direct and simple would work?

The only catch is the cases where I inserted the REF fields as hyperlinks. The /h after the bookmark name doesn’t make sense for a document property.

So I need to go through and remove the /h switches first. I’ll go check to see if there are other instances of “/h” that need to stay. If not, I’ll use something similar to zap all of them, then rerun the macro you suggested.

Thanks, Stuart. And sorry about asking the same question in two places. My bad.

Right – I do want to find deviations that are NOT part of character styles; it’s okay for my authors to apply character styles, but not okay for them to do direct manual formatting.

So when I do the runthrough and check for cases where the text of a paragraph has different format than the style applied to the paragraph, I want to ignore the character styles. So once I find a chunk of text that has a format difference, I want to see if it is different because a character style is applied to it.

Unless, of course, a totally different approach would work better in Word 2003….

Thanks.

Hmm. I’m trying to find manual formatting in the doc. So if I find a paragraph in my main loop that looks for formatting in a paragraph that doesn’t match the official paragraph style for that paragraph, I could search for that character style in the suspect paragraph’s range. I could temporarily reset the found range to the base paragraph style, then test the paragraph again to see if it still has nonmatching font/bold. If it does, then check again for the character style…etc.

Am I barking up yet another wrong tree here?
Thanks.