Month: August 2014

v1.73 now available

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I’ve uploaded the latest version for public use / testing / breaking and feedback.

A few bugs have been squashed and a new feature (List/Alter Section Breaks) has been added.

I’ve removed the No SAP feature as it was an old function (circa 2009!) that I wrote purely to fix a particular type of internal company document.  Now that they’re all fixed, it’s no longer required 🙂

This is the version that I will be demoing at the next ISTC (North West) meeting at MadLab in the Northern Quarter of Manchester on the 4th September.

Minor code update

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I had just about put the wraps on v1.72 and was getting ready to release it on this website .. when a work colleague pointed out an error in the Template detection code.

I dived into the code, printed the particular bit out and poured over it. I couldn’t work out what I had done .. and then I spotted I’d put an apostrophe inside two quote marks.  Instead of

If value = “” Then Do x,y or z.

I’d put

If value=”‘” Then Do x, y or z.

What a daft mistake – no wonder it wasn’t working!  A trip to the opticians is probably overdue.  *Hangs head in shame*

So I’ll postpone the release of v1.72, add some new features from my “To Do” list and hopefully get a release ready before the end of this week as v1.73.

New feature added

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Another new feature (a request received from a work colleague) whereby all of the Section Breaks within a document are listed on-screen along with the type of Section Break that it is (Next, Continuous, Odd, Even etc.).

You can then select any of the section breaks from the list box, change their type to be something else and click a button.  All of the changes are done very quickly (depending on speed of machine, memory etc.) and you’re then returned to the form.  The listbox has been updated along with the section breaks in your document.

In other news, Ribbon Creator 2013 has been purchased.  I’ll be using this tool to (hopefully) move some of the commands onto the Ribbon and away from the form-based GUI.   Well, that’s the plan 🙂

More tweaks to v1.71

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I’ve been busy tweaking some of the more basic functions within the Toolbox GUI this morning.

A quick bit of code to check that a template does actually exist within the file opened has prevented an error message appearing when you try to change it … within a template file.

Also on the basic functionality is an extra label running along the bottom of the Toolbox GUI which shows if the current file is Read/Write (with a red background) or Read-Only (green background).

Some nice feedback received

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After sending out a copy of the Add-In to two people I know via LinkedIn (that are very good with Word VBA), I got some nice feedback by return.

There’s no password / protection on my Add-In so that anyone who wants to look at how I’ve coded the Add-In (badly or otherwise), can dive in and have a good look around.

Some of the feedback received has already been implemented.  Especially a major speed-up in the ‘Which Fonts’ routine which is now blisteringly fast compared to the previous code.  Before the code tweak, the routine would examine every single character in a document and, if it was using a different font, would add it to the list.  The new version does the same thing but on a paragraph basis first and then, if there are mixed fonts found, it will examine the paragraph in question one character at a time.

I’m currently adding a lot more fields to the ‘Document Information’ screen after the above updates.  No idea when I’ll be able to release it though as I’m hoping more fee

v1.7 Released!

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I’ve finally got to a point where I need external feedback from other technical authors / Word gurus.

So I’ve released v1.7 and it’s available on the Downloads page.

The manual is included and has a full breakdown of all the features I’ve added since the first release (v1.65) was sent outside of where I work.

Tweaked Custom Styles UI

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Here’s the replacement UI for the old Custom Styles screen.  This is still classed as a WIP purely because I’m awaiting feedback from my colleagues as to what else they would like to be able to see appear in the list box.

tweakedcustomstylesui-15082014

You can remove Custom Styles as before but the additional feature is that you can also toggle the styles ‘Automatically Update’ status.  Select the style(s) and click the button.  Much easier than having to wade through Word 2013’s Style Gallery, find you custom style, then right-click on each of them to see if you want it and/or want to have Automatically Update switched on 🙂

Removing more code

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I decided to remove the Kill Old Styles function in its current form as it was a lot of hard-coded styles that would (probably) only appear in documents found within my workplace.

I’ll rethink the Custom Styles screen to include a few more functions that allow more tinkering with styles in bulk. For now there’s a large gap where the old function used to be. I have filled in some of the gap with a temporary function to toggle the ‘Automatically Update’ status of all styles in your document.  This will only be a temporary feature as there’s a lot more functionality I’d like to add re: styles but time is against me

Reworking old routines

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One of the first options I put into my Document Properties Report function was to extract all the styles that we (as in our Documentation Team) were interested in looking at.  This enabled us to look at a document’s styles and work out what (if anything) we needed to fix.

So I’ve spent the morning replacing a set of really old (and extra long) commands I’d constructed into a much neater subroutine.

Each Heading, TOC or other styles now has a much easier (on the eye) format of: Font Name (Font Size) and then the letters B, I or U following it depending on if Bold, Italic or Underline attributes are present.  Previously it had either a 0 or a -1 for True or False as that’s how you inspect the values under Word VBA.

Not much point sending this version (1.66d) out for testing as it’s just a “ah.. that’s better” release for me only 🙂

Ooops!

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I’ll call this one a ‘lesson learned’.  Whilst moving some of the code about that was linked to the CSV file reporting, I used a lot of ‘Debug.Print’ commands so that I could see that the output file was showing up as it should.

I spotted an error which would cause every CSV file to be ‘corrupt’ as each single line was being split across two lines.

After some pondering – and adding more Debug.Print commands here and there – I twigged the daft mistake that I had made.

I’d added a carriage return not to a Debug.Print command .. but the command above it! This caused the folder and file name to appear on one line, then all of that document’s properties on the next line.

Ah ..

A fixed version, and a sheepish apology, was sent out rather hurriedly to the TAs who I’d sent the preview of v1.66 to earlier on today.

Oops!