I’ve written my first Microsoft Word macro since, let me think, 1999. I’ve recorded macros to do repetitive tasks, but for work I needed something a little more… robust. Yeah, robust. That’s a good word. Robust.<\/p>\n
Wait. What was I saying? Oh, yes.<\/p>\n
There’s a process I have to run once a month. I ran it, the first time, my second day on the job, and I had a feeling that the macro the company supplied to do the job didn’t do the job when I ran it. When the printouts came, I knew–the macro hadn’t<\/i> worked. When I ran the process again last week, again, I felt that the macro hadn’t worked, though I managed to manually fix ninety percent of what the macro was supposed to catch.<\/p>\n
I had some downtime this morning while waiting on a report, so I decided to look at the macro code.<\/p>\n
If my jaw could have hit my desk, my jaw would have hit the desk.<\/p>\n
First, I hadn’t seen a macro written in WordBasic in, oh, ten years. WordBasic went out of style when Office 97 came out.<\/p>\n
Second, the reason the macro didn’t work was because what the macro was supposed<\/i> to do the macro wasn’t coded<\/i> to do.<\/p>\n
I talked to my supervisor, explained what I wanted to do, drew lots of circles as a demonstration, and he told me to knock myself out.<\/p>\n
I think I spent four hours on thirty lines of code. I wrote out the algorithm in plain English, then started looking for VBA examples online and in the VBA help system. (I have a VBA manual, but it’s in storage. Fat lot of good it’s doing me there.) And I used the macro recorder for the one tricky text manipulation I needed done. I found an example of the Do… Loop structure I wanted. I consulted VBA’s WordBasic-to-VBA equivalent page. I plugged in the code I’d recorded. Two other functions I’d done manually with the same data the original macro dealt with I automated with two more lines of code. I was shocked–it worked right the first time.<\/p>\n
If I have more time this week there are more functions I’ll add.<\/p>\n
The process will never<\/i> reach the point where I’ll be able to press a single button and voila!<\/i> because, let’s be frank, that would be obscene. But a whole sequence of search-and-replaces can be automated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve written my first Microsoft Word macro since, let me think, 1999. I’ve recorded macros to do repetitive tasks, but for work I needed something a little more… robust. Yeah, robust. That’s a good word. Robust. Wait. What was I saying? Oh, yes. There’s a process I have to run once a month. I ranContinue reading “On Word Macros”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[339,426,4124],"class_list":["post-1186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-computers","tag-microsoft-word","tag-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}