A Strange Quirk When Changing Fonts In M/S Word VBA

Oh, what an exciting life I lead. My first post, in the early AM of the first day of the year, and what is the topic? Coding. Woohoo! Happy New Year!

Anyways…

Following a Computer Cock-Up Of Monumental Proportions, which I might or might not expand—or, indeed, expound—upon in a later post, I ended up upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2010 a couple of weeks back. Anyone who remembers the experience of changing from the menu-based to the ribbon-based interface will, I hope, understand and sympathise with my profound sense of, erm, call it culture shock. Not only that, but I lost not only all the customisations and macros I'd made to Word over the years, but also the back-ups of same, which were on a USB hard-drive which got wiped during the course of the CCUOMP. (It's pronounced "queue-omp.")

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An “UndoRecord” Workaround For Pre-2010 Versions Of Microsoft Word VBA

It's a thing which annoyed me a little until I found out that users of later (2010 and on) versions of M/S Word than mine could do it. Then, while it still would never have featured anywhere near my top ten list of Most Annoying Things Ever, the green-eyed god on my be-chipped shoulder certainly hoisted it several feet further up the flag-pole of pesky annoyances….

If you have a macro which makes multiple changes, each of them is added to the undo stack separately, which means, obviously, that you have to hit the undo button or Ctrl+Z multiple times to undo those changes. Which is kind of a bugger if you're unsure how many changes it actually made, either 'cause you've forgotten the workings of the macro or 'cause there's a few if…then clauses in there.

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Using A Counter In A VBA Macro

T'other day, I knocked together a macro, for a friend, to number the paragraphs in a Microsoft Word document ("manual" rather than hard-coded numbering, that is):

Sub NumberingParagraphs()

    Dim iParagraphs As Integer
    iParagraphs = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.Count
    
    Selection.HomeKey unit:=wdStory
     
    Do While iCount < iParagraphs
        iCount = iCount + 1
        Selection.TypeText iCount & ": "
        Selection.MoveDown unit:=wdParagraph
    Loop

End Sub

My mate, being curious about, but not having experience of, the workings of such things, took a look and got the basic idea, but couldn't get his head around why the number of loops is seemingly instructed to be one less than the number of paragraphs. Surely, he said, it should be "less than or equal to," rather than "less than." Well, no. His kid got it straight away, and came up with a lovely semi-analogy; which I now share, in hopes that others who've been puzzled by this oft-seen seeming-paradox might see the light. Let's literally (yet figuratively) walk through the macro…

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Change Any Number To Text In Microsoft Word

When I were but a wee nipper, the words "billion" and "trillion" were hardly ever heard, outside of hyperbole, unless one had an interest in astronomy and cosmology. (And even then, we had to be careful in our reading, since the nationality of the author and the editorial policies of their British publisher might make a difference, what with our billion being, until recently, a thousand times larger than the American billion.) These days, "billion" is much more often seen, mostly because of the now-universal adoption of 10⁹ rather than 10¹² as the definition of the word, which brings things like world population and national debts into its range; and on the topic of national debts, "trillion" (also shrunken by a factor of one thousand in UK terms) is, distressingly, coming into much more common usage. Which is partly why I found the idea of Microsoft Word's cardtext feature, which converts figures into words—but only up to 999,999—rather less than useful.

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A Macro To Tell If A String Is All Letters

A goodly while back someone, somewhere, asked me if there was a workaround for this and I said I'd get back to 'em. Problem is I can't remember where the question was asked, so I'm just going to post it here and hope they read the blog…

There's an easy way, in VBA, to tell if a selected string in a Microsoft Word document is a number:

Sub IsNumber()
  
  If IsNumeric(Selection) = True Then
    MsgBox "It's a number"
  Else
    MsgBox "It's not a number"
  End If
End Sub

(It will count strings with commas and/or full-stops* (used as decimal points) in them as numbers provided everything else is a digit.)

* That's "periods" to some of you strange foreign types.

Unfortunately there's no equivalent method for telling if a string contains nothing but letters, and that's the workaround I was asked for. Well, my first thought was something like this:

Sub Sub IsABC()
  If Selection.Range.Case = wdLowerCase Or _
   Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord Then MsgBox "All letters"
End Sub

… but with a complete list of possible cases instead of just the two in that example. Unfortunately, it turns out that provided the selection includes letters, it'll quite happily report spaces, commas, hyphens etc and even numbers, as being letters. Select one of those things on its own however, and it won't do so—which does leave us with the option of checking character-by-character. So here's my workaround. It ain't pretty, but it does do the job asked of it:

Sub IsABC()
  
  Dim iSelected As Integer
  iSelected = Len(Selection)
  
   iCount = 0
  Do While iCount < iSelected
   iCount = iCount + 1
    If Selection.Range.Characters.Last.Case = wdUpperCase = False And _
     Selection.Range.Characters.Last.Case = wdLowerCase = False Then
      Selection.moveend unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=iCount - 1
      MsgBox "Not all letters"
      Exit Sub
    End If
    Selection.moveend unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
  Loop
  Selection.MoveRight unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=iSelected, Extend:=wdExtend
  MsgBox "All letters"
End Sub

All it does is check the final character in the selection, then shrink the selection by one character and check again, until it either runs into something that's not upper or lower case (i.e., not a letter)—in which case it reselects the characters it's deselected and reports that the selection is "Not all letters"—or until it runs out of things to check, in which case it reselects the whole lot and reports that the selection is indeed "All letters." (Presumably, in actual use, it would make a Boolean true or false. I didn't ask what it was wanted for.)

Anyways, that's me lot. As ever, I hope this will be of help to somebody.
—Daz

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Oops!

I'll begin with a heads-up for John Zande. The first part of this might interest you, John, as I believe it meets a criterion you were asking about a while back.

A kind soul of my acquaintance took it upon herself to beta-test those macros I posted t'other day. Turns out there's a couple of bugs. Both are minor in that they're easily fixed, but one is potentially disastrous in that it causes what I (probably erroneously) think of as a feedback loop. So let's take a look at that first. (I would, in the normal course of things, just edit the post in question and publish a correction-post pointing it out, but as I say, John was asking for an example of this kind of thing a while back, so what the hell; let's expound on it a bit.)

The macro in question is the SelectTheWord macro, and the part that's buggy is this bit:

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Highlighting Text Between Two Strings In M/S Word

A couple of years back, when I first discovered macros, I kinda fell a bit in love with them. In particular I was entranced by the Visual Basic Editor packaged with Microsoft Office for the purpose of editing macros, or even writing them from scratch, bypassing the rather naff macro recorder. Long before I had a clue how to even begin to decipher the inner workings of these magical text-spells, let alone edit one myself, I was happily pillaging the internet for complete projects offered up by those sorcerers who do know how to create conjurations with this Clarkian magic. Like any denizen of Arthur C Clarke's magical kingdom, I may not know how to bind the spirits to a purpose, but when a friendly magician gives me the already-imbued Ring Of Invisibility and tells me the magic word, I can use the fruits of her labour with ease.

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Adding Paragraph Tags Using M/S Word’s Find-Replace Function

Ever since I posted an article on Microsoft Word macros, I've had a steady-ish stream of searchers landing on the page, looking for how to enclose paragraphs in <p> … </p> tags using Word's Find/Replace function. I mentioned in passing, in that post, that it can be done but I didn't expand on it. So here's how to do that.

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Creating & Editing Macros In M/S Word

[In which I moan about the abysmal macro-recorder in M/S Office, and show how to create and edit a macro.]

I finished my previous article with a comment that I've long wanted to have a bit of a whinge about M/S Word's macro recorder. Before I do that, though, I suppose I'd better explain what a macro recorder is. Indeed, what a macro is, given the number of people I've run into who seem have no idea that such things exist. Not to mention the number who start to back away slowly from my apparent geekism if I actually start discussing the ins and outs of them!

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