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What's new on this site?

Friday 3rd, February 2012

The link in the property rental agreement template was pointing to the wrong web page. Fixed this and a few other minor issues with the template.

Thursday 2nd, February 2012

In an effort to expand the selection of templates on my web site, I have produced a document template, intended to form the basis of a variety of property rental agreements. The template demonstrates a fictitious holiday rental company, but can be edited to perform a variety of tasks, driven by a VBA userform.

Wednesday 25th, January 2012

I have improved the logic behind the display of the main userform for envelopes and labels add-in for Word. While superficially the product is the same and the functionality the same, the messaging on the userform sometimes went awry. I have therefore created a completely different function to display the messages and dialogs, so that hopefully it should not lose track.

Monday 23rd, January 2012

A user pointed out that the covering e-mail message text box would not allow multi-line text entry in the Many to One mail merge add-in. This was clearly an oversight. Now fixed.

Thursday 19th, January 2012

A number of users have complained of 'Subscript out of range' errors when using the merge to attachments add-in. This error is usually a result of an error in the Excel data source that the add-in cannot handle. There is not much I can do about that, but I have made the error message more descriptive and I have enhanced the recovery from such an error.

Wednesday 18th, January 2012

Minor detail change to one of the dialogs in the Many To One Mail Merge add-in, and (hopefully) improved crash recovery.

Inspired by a Microsoft Answers Forum question, I have added  a web page showing a method of using graphics as 'radio' buttons in a userform.

Tuesday 17th, January 2012

As I indicated on my individual merge letters web page, the techniques used in the series 2.0 version on the add-in cannot be used in Word 2003, as there is a bug in the events used to split the merge, that was not fixed until Word 2007. However for the past couple of days I have been developing a workaround to allow the modified add-in to also work in Word 2003, and so as not to have to support two different versions of the same tool, I have incorporated the workaround in the new 2007/2010 versions. I also took the opportunity to update the dialogs of the 2003 version to more closely match the 2007/2010 versions. Apart from the font used (Tahoma rather than Calibri, which came with Word 2007), the omission of docx document creation and the availability of PDF creation only by means of Adobe Acrobat, the two versions are now very similar.

Monday 16th, January 2012

To paraphrase the Scottish poet Robert Burns, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and so it was with the major update of my individual merge letters add-in. Re-testing this morning with some different merge documents, including one with lots of duplicated data in the name field, I found that the filename extensions were being multiplied.. So a quick re-write of the offending section was necessary this morning. Hopefully the further changes have nailed that one, so apologies to those who may have downloaded the update in the meantime. Version 2.1 now available.

Sunday 15th, January 2012

The individual merge letters add-in has proved a popular download, but there have been a few niggling issues with it and some user feedback that I haven't until now addressed, so recently I have undertaken a major revision of the way the add-in works to try and make it more reliable and to address those issues that have bothered me and some users.

As the add-in has been subject to a major re-write, I have taken the opportunity to restart the version numbering from  - now Version 2.0 - and set it to match my other principle add-ins in terms of presentation. If you liked the earlier version, you should find this one an improvement. Because of the nature of the changes, I have made it available only for Word 2007 and Word 2010 (which should include the 64 bit version).

The web page itself has been re-written and the references to the old Word 2003 version (which is still available) have been omitted.

Thursday 12th, January 2012

Amended the notes at the start of the individual merge letters add-in page.

Monday 9th, January 2012

Another year and my web host One and One are in the process of changing the platform from Windows 2003 to Windows Server 2008R2. This may result in disruptions to service towards the end of the month and I may have to make changes to the site to accommodate the changes, which no longer include support for FrontPage Server Extensions. Perhaps it is time to revamp the layout, but with over 3000 files on the site that is not going to be a five minute job.

Tuesday 27th, December 2011

User feedback suggested that there was an issue related to my add-in calendar template in that with some regional date configurations the calendar would produce the wrong start dates for each month. I have made some corrections to the way the start date is calculated so that regional issues should not affect the results. I also took the opportunity to combine both year and month calendars in the same dialog.

Wednesday 21st, December 2011

In response to user feedback I have updated the many to one mail merge add-in to allow the use of merge fields in the document header/footer.

Monday 19th, December 2011

I have produced an add-in to facilitate the insertion of Outlook addresses into Word documents. This add-in is intended to enhance the built-in address book function to allow the user easily to add elements such as job title or e-mail address.

Saturday 17th, December 2011

A user has pointed out a problem with the function to print an envelope or label from Outlook Contacts. I must have posted the wrong zip file during housekeeping of the web site. I have fixed the error and made some improvements to the installation instructions based on that user's feedback.

Monday 5th, December 2011

Yesterday I posted a modification to the merge to e-mail with attachments add-in to allow the user to select from available Outlook e-mail accounts. I have now added this same facility to the many to one mail merge add-in, however in that application the addition was somewhat more complicated, so did not make yesterday's updates. That has now been addressed.

Sunday 4th, December 2011

The merge to e-mail with attachments add-in has been enhanced to allow the user to select the sending account from the available Outlook e-mail accounts.

Thursday 1st, December 2011

Replaced the module for selecting the folder for the merged letters in the individual merge letters add-ins for Word 2007 and 2010, with a function that may work better in some circumstances. If version 61 works for you there is no need to update to 62.

Wednesday 30th, November 2011

It occurred to me that the Word 64 bit modifications I made yesterday will render the add-ins unusable in Word 2007, so as there are likely to be far more Word 2007 users than Word 64 bit users, I have added back the earlier versions into the zip files for 2007 users. These earlier versions are operationally identical to the Word 2010 versions.

I have updated the page What to do when Word crashes. the information it contained was valid, but the illustrations and some of the instructions were outdated, so I have used new illustrations and instructions to account for the changes.

I have also updated the Word 2007 version of the individual merge letters add-in to match the Word 2010 version and updated the web page to reflect the changes.

Tuesday 29th, November 2011

The many to one mail merge, and merge to e-mail with attachments add-ins have been updated to improve Word 64 bit compatibility. The downloads file also include the previous version for Word 2007 users. The versions are operationally identical.

Sunday 26th, November 2011

Because of the potential for errors when the many to one mail merge and the merge to e-mail with attachments add-ins are merged to invalid or missing e-mail addresses, I have developed a function to validate the e-mail addresses in the Excel data sources used with these functions. Where errors are found, a warning message is displayed and a new document is created that contains the errant record numbers and their associated e-mail addresses to aid with their location and correction.

Thursday 24th, November 2011

Added a note of re the creating of totals of listed fields on the many to one mail merge add-in page. The sample documents included in the zip file have been changed. No changes have been made to the add-in itself.

Wednesday 23rd, November 2011

I have completely revised the Many-to-One mail merge add-in and and updated its format to match the format of version 2+ of the merge to e-mail with attachments add-in. Version 3.0 of the add-in now includes the additional error trapping promised earlier to cover most if not all of the issues that previously gave rise to problems for users.

Bug fix to mail merge to e-mail with attachments. Current version is now 2.4.

Monday 21st, November 2011

I have changed the way the  mail merge to e-mail with attachments add-in works with respect to merging to the body of an e-mail message, altered some of the messaging and added some more error trapping. Current version is now 2.3

Sunday 20th, November 2011

User reports suggested that version 2.1 of the mail merge to e-mail with attachments add-in would not work with Office 2007. Now fixed with 2.2.

Saturday 19th, November 2011

I have made further improvements to the mail merge to e-mail with attachments add-in. The latest version (2.1) no longer sends the messages immediately, but creates a temporary Outlook folder in which to store them until they are sent in a separate process. This should eliminate, or at least minimise, the possibility of sending inappropriate messages to everyone in your database.

Thursday 17th, November 2011

Fixed a minor bug in the yearly calendar function of the perpetual calendar, extended the dates from 5 years before to ten years after and updated the display of the userforms.

Wednesday 16th, November 2011

The Mail Merge with Attachments add-in has been extensively revised and upgraded and I have updated the web page to reflect the new interface.

Minor detail changes to the interfaces of the Save Numbered Versions, Save to Two Locations, and the Variables etc editor add-ins.

Saturday 12th, November 2011

Following a major revision of the associated add-in I have updated my Envelope and Labels add-in web page. The new version of the add-in enables envelopes and labels to be created with a variety of alternative return addresses and optional logo graphic. In addition the add-in also creates envelope and label documents which may easily be converted for use as mail merge documents, by attaching a data source and inserting the merge fields were indicated. The add-in includes the sample templates and graphics used to create the web page illustrations..

In addition I have updated the alternative return address page, as this add-in largely makes that redundant for Word 2007 and 2010 users.

Sunday 6th, November 2011

Improved the code to add a row to a table in a protected form.

Wednesday 2nd, November 2011

Inspired by the Outlook Envelope/Label macro that I updated earlier this week, I have made available an add-in for Word which provides the ability to more easily create envelopes and labels for a single address, than by using the functions built into Word ... or at least that as the aim.

Updated the code to extract data from content controls.

Monday 31st, October 2011

Halloween and a slightly scary update to the Outlook Envelope/Label macros to improve the functionality.

Saturday 8th, October 2011

Updated the Duplex Postcard merge data converter for Word 2007 and 2010. Although the original was compatible with those versions, the update adds a button to the Mailings Tab of the ribbon and the code has been revised to employ userforms throughout both for user input and messaging. The zip file includes the earlier version and optional installers for both.

Sunday 18th, September 2011

Further minor bug fix to the List Variables etc. editor.

Thursday 15th, September 2011

Minor bug fix to the List Variables etc. editor.

Tuesday 6th, September 2011

Added a few more photographs to the 2011 gallery.

Saturday 3rd, September 2011

Minor detail changes to the Word 2010 version of the associate printer add-in. Printers now listed alphabetically and some changes to the information messages in response to user feedback.

Thursday 1st, September 2011

Updated and improved the add-in to associate a printer with a Word document, with particular relevance to Word 2010. The old version of the add-in is retained in the download package for use with earlier Word versions. The associated web page has been updated to show the Word 2010 dialogs.

Thursday 18th, August 2011

Added a note to the downloads page with respect to the Word filters. It seems that some of these old filters will no longer work.

Wednesday 10th, August 2011

I have reworked the individual merge letters add-in for Word 2010 to eliminate message boxes and replaced them with a userform with variable texts. I have also redesigned the main userform for ease of use - particularly on wide screen laptops. The dialog changes are shown on the associated web page. The add-in is otherwise functionally identical to the previous version.

Sunday 7th, August 2011

Following two requests in recent days to allow the use of a full stop (period) in the field used to create the filename, when employing the individual merge letters add-in, I have made some modifications to the code to allow the character.

Wednesday 3rd, August 2011

As the Usenet newsgroups are effectively dead as far as Microsoft Word is concerned, and Microsoft has removed the bridge access from its Answers forums, I have removed the web page that explains how to access them using the bridge software.

Wednesday 20th, July 2011

Last week, an accident involving 2000 tons of explosives, stored on a military base adjacent to the main power station, that covers the republic of Cyprus where I live, exploded, killing 13 people and injuring many others, some seriously. The explosion damaged houses 10 km away from the blast and also destroyed the power station, resulting in the island's electricity authority's inability to meet peak consumption demands. This means that for the foreseeable future we will be experiencing frequent cuts to the power supply and the internet, so if you have a problem relating to any of the items on my web site, I may not be able to reply promptly.

Sunday 10th, July 2011

Andreas Killer has updated his add-in to convert sequential index numbers to fix a small bug.

Monday 4th, July 2011

Fixed a typo in the code of the sequentially numbered label add-in for Word 2003, and added an installer for both this and the Word 2007/2010 version.

Saturday 2nd, July 2011

Minor bug fix to the variables, bookmarks and content controls editor. I also took the opportunity to change the fonts used in the userform to Calibri, which display better on some Windows 7 laptop displays, than Tahoma used previously.

Friday 1st, July 2011

Regular Microsoft Answers Word Forum contributor Andreas Killer came up with an add-in, in response to a forum question, to convert sequential index numbers to hyphenated lists e.g. 1, 3, 5. 6. 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, 25 is converted to 1, 3, 5-10, 13, 18-19, 25. The add-in is supplied in DOT format which is compatible with recent Word versions.

Monday 27th, June 2011

I have modified and updated the 'boiler' add-ins used for inserting a selection of documents into a Word document and added the option of self extracting installation files. The web page has been updated to reflect the changes to the dialogs.

The Word 97-2000 version of the add-in is unchanged.

Sunday 26th, June 2011

I have added self extracting installers to the AmiPro, Works and WordStar text converters, which also create the required registry entries. I have created a similar installer for several of the more popular addins (and will add others as the files they contain are updated\). The add-in installers will remove older versions of the add-ins automatically. It remains possible to manually install these files should you prefer.

Added a few more photographs of the mountains.

Friday 24th, June 2011

Over the past few weeks, I have been undertaking a major re-write of the save a document to two locations add-in to improve error trapping and to add the ability to create numbered backups. The updated version is now available along with revisions to the web page to encompass the changes..

Saturday 18th, June 2011

The mail merge with attachments add-in that has been available here for some time, has a large userform. Following a comment from a user that the userform is too large to fit on some displays, notably widescreen layout notebook displays, I have completely redesigned the userform to allow it to work appropriately with such displays.

I also took the opportunity to revisit the error checking and update the web page instructions. Version 1.4 is now available for download and linked from that page.

Thursday 9th, June 2011

I thought it about time I added a photo gallery for 2011.

Thursday 2nd, June 2011

Made some changes to the example coding shown the UserForm page. The code may now also be copied and pasted to the vba editor.

Sunday 22nd, May 2011

Added a new page to demonstrate the creation of a simple userform.

Thursday 19th, May 2011

Updated the WordStar text converter installation instructions for Windows 7 64 bit.

Updated the envelope templates.

Monday 25th, April 2011

Updated the mail merge with attachments add-in to improve the resolution in the merge to PDF attachments option.

Changed some of the wording on the Word tips page, with respect to the page added on the 14th. April.

Tuesday 19th, April 2011

Updated the downloads page, and the readme files associated with the old text/graphics filters on that page to reflect changes incurred by Windows 7 64 bit filing systems.

Thursday 14th, April 2011

Added a page to cover the issue of the Word page displaying on the left - especially on wide screen displays.

Add notes to the end of the save a document in two places add-in page to cover the issue of always saving documents to the same copy location, without the prompt for each document.

Tuesday 5th, April 2011

Fixed a minor display issue relating to the docvariables, bookmarks and content controls editor that prevented all of the available document properties from being listed. Version 1.9 now available.

Thursday 24th, March 2011

Revised the favourites page and added a link to a new (to me) Office Tutorials site.

Wednesday 23rd, March 2011

Modified the individual merge letters add-in for Word 2003, which apparently produced documents that opened in normal/draft view, and which I had missed as I set my personal view with auto macros which over-ride the settings in the document. This has now been corrected.

Sunday 13th, March 2011

User feedback identified a bug in the Save a Document to Two Locations add-in that prevented saving to a sub folder on a flash drive. That bug is now fixed in version 1.2 of the add-in. The same user also identified a potential issue that may affect users of Windows 7 and in particular the 64 but version as the macro makes a call on an OCX file that may not be available. The download therefore includes this OCX file and instructions for its installation.

Monday 28th, February 2011

Spotted and fixed a minor spelling error in one of the user information messages in the bookmarks and variables etc editor.

Saturday 26th, February 2011

Modified and updated the SaveReminder add-in for Word 2007 and 2010. The earlier version did not work reliably in Word 2010. The updated version should now do so .

I have developed a new add-in for Word 2007 and 2010 (based largely on a macro from frequent collaborator Doug Robbins) to facilitate mail merge to e-mail with attachments and removed the old page that offered a similar function but in a rather less friendly format.

The Many To One Merge page (also based on a macro from Doug) has been rewritten and the add-in has been updated and improved. The original Many To One merge add-in also featured a chart merge module. This is currently under re-development and has been removed from the add-in for the moment. When I am happy with the changes I will make it available as a separate add-in.

Monday 14th, February 2011

Version 1.1 of the an add-in for Word 2007 and 2010 to save the current document to two locations, uploaded which includes error trapping for floppy disc use and permits the use of the Desktop as a storage location for the duplicate document.

Sunday 13th, February 2011

I have added a new page featuring an add-in for Word 2007 and 2010 to save the current document to two locations. This takes the simple macros shown on the Automatically Backup a Word Document page to a higher level of sophistication. It was originally my intention to incorporate this in the Save Numbered Versions add-in, but I have been persuaded to separate them. This has resulted in the need to make some detail changes to the Save Numbered Versions add-in - primarily to dialogs. The web page has been updated to reflect the changes..

Wednesday 9th, February 2011

It was pointed out to me that the old AmiPro converter did not work under Windows 7 because of permissions problems relating to temporary files. User Peter Woods of Atec Solutions (UK) has hacked the file to produce a fix and that is now also included in the download.

For some times I have been working on an add-in to provide version numbering for Word documents. The results of my efforts are to be found in a new page which describes its use and provides a link to the download..

Saturday 5th, February 2011

In view of forthcoming changes to the Microsoft forums later this month I have made changes to the wording of the Home and Newsgroup access pages.

Thanks to Greg Maxey, the code to extract data from Content Controls has been enhanced to include the extraction the path data of linked images

Friday 4th, February 2011

It has been a while since I revisited my page on extracting data from protected forms, so when user feedback suggested that the principle macro on that page did not work in Word 2010, it was time for a re-think. I have therefore replaced some of the code on that page with more up to date versions.

Thursday 3rd, February 2011

User feedback reported that the new content control etc editor would crash in French language versions of Word. This has been fixed for version 1.7. The changes do not affect English language versions.

Tuesday 1st, February 2011

Jumped to Version 1.6 of the new content control etc editor. This version fixes a niggle of mine to allow inserted content controls to behave as inserted cross references to variables, bookmarks etc. i.e. the function checks to ensure that if the cursor is in a content control (having inserted one from the editor), instead of barring the action, it creates the control immediately after the the control containing the cursor.

Saturday 29th, January 2011

Following user feedback I have completely redesigned the perpetual calendars page to include an add-in compatible with Word 2007 and 2010. The code that was causing users problems related to the use of a Userform to collect the data and has been removed from the page. The missing macro has been enhanced and included in the add-in, available for download from the revised page.

Version 1.4 of the new content control etc editor uploaded. It addresses the new dual purpose User Notification and Action Panel for review and deleting the XML map nodes.  The illustrations have been updated to reflect the changes

Also added is the ability to select a Content Control directly in the document and map it. There was inconsistency in the behaviour of the Add-In when creating a new variable, Custom Document Property or Bookmark.  The code has been altered so they all now do the same things.

Friday 28th, January 2011

Following user feedback I have added the user form used for the perpetual calendar as a downloadable file.

Version 1.3 of the new content control etc editor uploaded. Adds a user conformation for the option to delete all content controls. Also updated some of the illustrations to make them less 'busy'.

Thursday 27th, January 2011

Version 1.2 of the new content control etc editor uploaded. Traps the insertion of an incorrect password in a protected document, plus some insignificant changes to user information messages.

Wednesday 26th, January 2011

Almost inevitably as we went to press with version 1.0 of the new content controls etc editor, some minor detail changes arose. Version 1.1 now available.

Tuesday 25th, January 2011

After much development and testing Greg Maxey and I are finally in a position to release a major upgrade as a replacement for the bookmark and variable editor (the final version 25 of which remains available from the downloads page, though no more development work will take place on that one).

The new editor is much enhanced and includes functions for the handling of document Content Controls. The accompanying add-in for Word 2007 and 2010 (32 bit version) is able to list content controls, docproperties, docvariables and bookmarks in a document, edit their content, add new items (including items in dropdown property field listings) and insert references to them, thus exploiting the potential of all these means of holding and presenting data, without the requirement for any programming knowledge

The editor is a joint project and will be available from both our web sites and links are provided both above and on the linked page to Greg's site.

I have also added a minor change to the macro to convert text to field codes.

Sunday 23rd, January 2011

Minor change to yesterday's macro from Paul Edstein.

Saturday 22nd, January 2011

At the suggestion of fellow Word MVP Paul Edstein, and based on a macro supplied by him, I have added a macro to the page on exporting field codes to text, to reverse the process and convert text to field codes.

Following a user request I have added the ability to edit the address from the dialog in the Outlook Envelope & Label Printing tool.

Tuesday 18th, January 2011

I have completely revised the macro to save numbered document versions and removed the two alternative versions previously offered.

I have also temporarily removed my add-in of sample macros from the downloads page. I will return this when I have revised the contents.

Monday 17th, January 2011

Following a user question in the Microsoft Office programming forum from a user who wanted to create messages that the user could click to accept an invitation to view a file, I came up with a new web page to demonstrate a method of reading an HTML file into the body of a new Outlook e-mail message.

Thursday 13th, January 2011

In response to user feedback I have modified the error reporting for illegal filename characters in the individual merge letters add-ins.

Saturday 8th, January 2011

While working on a complementary project involving content controls, Greg spotted a potential issue with the bookmark and variable editor, should the user attempt to insert a cross reference into an inappropriate content control e.g. into a picture content control. This has now been trapped - version 25 is now the live version.

Tuesday 4th, January 2011

Overnight (mine not his - as we live on opposite sides of the world) Greg has made further improvements to the handling of dropdown form fields in the bookmark and variable editor, and in the process found and fixed a couple more bugs - version 24 is now the live version.

Greg and I cannot agree which tab of the ribbon the button for the bookmark and variable editor should appear on. Currently it is on the Insert Tab, which is where it best suits my way of working. Greg feels that it should be on the Add-Ins tab. If anyone has any comments on this please use the feedback link on the home page.

Monday 3rd, January 2011

Fixed a couple more small bugs in the bookmark and variable editor  - version 22 uploaded.

Sunday 2nd, January 2011

Added some extra functionality to the bookmark and variable editor and fixed a number of small issues.

Saturday 1st, January 2011

Instead of spending New Year's Eve drinking hard liquor and partying, my industrious friend Greg Maxey has been polishing the 'cannon ball' bookmark and variable editor, primarily for his own particular use, whereas I have wanted to offer a more straightforward offering that would appeal to a wider range of users - and of course my own way of working and Greg's are dissimilar.

Some of his changes I have adopted, some modified, others abandoned. In particular the original decision to present both built-in and document properties in the same list was confusing, especially as it was possible to have the same names applied to both built-in and custom properties. This has now been changed to employ separate listings for built-in and custom properties. It also meant a complete rebuild of the web page to incorporate all the changed dialogs.

 

 

 

Friday 31st, December 2010

Ending the year with a few minor bug fixes to the bookmark and variable editor - now version 18.

Thursday 30th, December 2010

The facility to edit document properties has been added to the bookmark and variable editor for Word 2007 and 2010, necessitating a major revision of the web page. Greg Maxey can take much of the credit for the additions.

Sunday 26th, December 2010

Took a respite from holiday festivities to add a new page featuring a bookmark and variable editor add-in for Word 2007 and 2010 (32 bit version) to list docvariables and bookmarks in a document, edit their content and insert references to them..

Friday 24th, December 2010

Made some improvements to the first macro and associated instructions of the Extract Data From Forms page.

Monday 20th, December 2010

Added some minor code enhancements to the additions posted on Friday last to the Stop Automatic Date Update page.

Friday 17th, December 2010

Added macro functions to display the last modified date in a document to the Stop Automatic Date Update page.

Wednesday 8th, December 2010

Modified the batch printing macro to simplify the code and improve the speed of the process.

Monday 6th, December 2010

Added a note to the Document Not Found page relating to Office 2010 Click to Run installations.

Saturday 4th, December 2010

Fixed a macro coding error in the Word 2000 version of the boiler add-in.

Monday 25th, October 2010

Rectified a crucial omission from the instructions relating to the envelope and label function for Outlook. Also modified the user form code to cater for label formats that have narrow spacing cells between rows and/or columns.

Sunday 24th, October 2010

A new page describing a function available to download to add the ability to print an envelope or label in Outlook for the currently selected contact.

Friday 22nd, October 2010

Added further notes to the Individual Merge Letters page.

Sunday 17th, October 2010

Further wording changes and illustrations added to the Document Not Found page.

Friday 15th, October 2010

Some minor wording changes and an additional illustration added to the Document Not Found page.

Wednesday 13th, October 2010

Completely re-wrote the page concerning extracting e-mail data from an Outlook message to a Word table, with all new macro code.

Wednesday 6th, October 2010

The splitmerge add-in has proved incompatible with the 64 bit version of Word 2010, so I have created a new version for Word 2010 only that overcomes the problems and should be compatible with both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Office 2010.

Thursday 23rd, September 2010

Updated and improved the macro code relating to splitting merge documents - Individual merge letters

Wednesday 22nd, September 2010

Minor bug fixes to the Many To One, Splitmerge, and Numbered Labels add-ins, and some minor changes to example macro codes on the following pages - Globally Replace with Autotext, Clear Recently Used File List, Extract Data From Forms, Save Numbered Versions and Some Useful Word Macro Examples

Tuesday 31st, August 2010

The code to fix the issue relating to tables of contents in merge documents, added to the Word 2007/2010 version yesterday, has now been applied to the Word 2003 version of the splitmerge add-in also.

Monday 30th, August 2010

The heat here must be getting to me. After messing around with the routine to fix the TOC problem with the splitmerge add-in for much of yesterday afternoon, I posted version 52 of the addin. Today, after a pleasant drive in the countryside, with the benefit of climate control to cool the brain, it occurred that it would be much simpler to establish whether there was a TOC in the merge document, then run a sub-routine to fix each split document as it was created, thus completely transparently to the user. So version 53 of the splitmerge add-in now has that functionality.

Sunday 29th, August 2010

Fixed a minor coding anomaly in version 15 of the ManyToOne add-in that has not warranted a new revision number. If you downloaded version 15 yesterday, you may want to re-download, though in practice you will not notice any difference.

Following a number of requests from users employing the splitmerge add-in with merge documents containing Tables Of Contents, which do not survive the merge process, I produced a macro to address the problem. I have now added the macro along with some additional error correction to the Word 2007/2010 version of the splitmerge add-in. The rest of the add-in acts exactly as before, so if you do not create merge documents with tables of contents, there is no need to download this version.

Saturday 28th, August 2010

Revised the ManyToOne mail merge add-in further to add more error trapping and revised the web page to show the new dialogs.

Friday 27th, August 2010

A few more modifications to the ManyToOne mail merge add-in and some changes to the text on the associated web page. Version 12 is now available for download.

Saturday 21st, August 2010

In response to a problem identified by a user, the ManyToOne mail merge add-in has undergone some minor additional error trapping. Version 11 is now available for download.

Saturday 31st, July 2010

Where appropriate I have updated the web pages to reflect the changes wrought by the launch of Word 2010. Most of the Word related material here is affected to a greater or lesser extent. Major changes have been made to the http://www.gmayor.com/Toolbars_in_word_2007.htm page, to cover the possibility of template conflicts - and I have updated the registry patch that accompanies the page.

I have also made some minor modifications to the Splitmerge add-in to allow it to be used with Word 2010. This entailed a minor change to one of the user forms and an additional line of code to enable the macro to identify the presence of the Word 2010 PDF add-in.

Sunday 13th, June 2010

Added instructions for using the community bridge with Outlook Express. The principles involved are similar for other newsreaders. The instructions are intended to be read in conjunction with the installation instructions from the community bridge web site.

Monday 7th, June 2010

Overnight Microsoft has turned off the Word newsgroups from its news server!!! You can still access them using a third party news server - see the entry below for the 24th May 2010.

Fixed a minor typo in the macro to format chemical formulae.

Sunday 6th, June 2010

Added a note and illustrations about declaring variables in the Installing Macros web page.

Added illustrations (courtesy of fellow MVP Jay Freedman) and comment to the installation instructions for the mscal.ocx file used in the Pop Up Calendar web page relating to the use of the Calendar object in 64 bit Windows systems.

Saturday 29th, May 2010

MVP Jochen Kalmbach has produced a single bridge that combines the functions of the two Microsoft forum bridges, available from http://communitybridge.codeplex.com/. This link has also been added to my newsgroup access page.

Monday 24th, May 2010

It has been a black weekend for users of the Microsoft Usenet web server as Microsoft phases out its links with its help forums, leading to the closure of its NNTP server msnews.microsoft.com reportedly on the 1st June 2010. If you wish to continue accessing the Microsoft product newsgroups you will probably have to look for another server to continue to do so. Your ISP may provide a news feed, or you could look to a third party text based news server such as Eternal September or Albasani

Microsoft has introduced a new Help forum and for those who wish to continue accessing the new Word forums it contains, using news reading software, they have introduced a pair of NNTP bridges which provide the link.

I have made some further changes to the page on connecting to newsgroups and to my page (unconnected with the above) about envelope orientation issues with printers

Wednesday 19th, May 2010

Further revisions to the lost Outlook attachments page.

Tuesday 18th, May 2010

Revised the page concerning the recovery of lost Outlook attachments, following changes to the way Outlook handles attachments that are opened directly.

Sunday 9th, May 2010

Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its news server in a staged withdrawal during the summer of 2010. The Word newsgroups will be among the first to be discontinued from the 1st June. Users who want support will then have to use a web based service. For more information, see Accessing Microsoft Newsgroups with Outlook Express.

Saturday 1st, May 2010

Created a new page demonstrating a method of dating individual pages of a document when they are updated. The macro and field construction described on the page are included in a sample document which you can download.

Friday 23rd, April 2010

Added a note to the Office 2003 Proofing Tools with Word 2007 page to point out that the procedure doesn't work with Word 2010.

Thursday 22nd, April 2010

Added a short note of clarification to the extract images from Word 2007 section of the extract images page.

Thursday 15th, April 2010

Added code to the create a calendar page to create monthly calendars.

Tuesday 13th, April 2010

Added a page featuring a macro to create yearly calendars in Word

Saturday 10th, April 2010

Added a macro to the Word VBA examples to simplify setting a tab at the centre of the area between the current margins and also at the right margin.

Wednesday 7th, April 2010

Added a missing link to the Envelope Add-in page and update some text on the downloads page.

Removed the essentially duplicate page Converter Shows Garbage and redirected users to Problems opening 2007 docs

Sunday 4th, April 2010

Added a photograph of the local Easter bonfire celebrations for Easter.

Saturday 3rd, April 2010

Doug Robbins has added a module to the Word 2007 version of the Many To One merge add-in to enable the merging of chart data from an Excel data source. The use of the module is documented on the associated web page and the sample documents used to explain the use of the module is supplied with the add-in.

Thursday 1st, April 2010

I have added some further notes of clarification to the Problems Opening 2007 Docs page

Sunday 14th, March 2010

The first of the year's pictures added to the 2010 gallery features a handful of photographs of Paphos by night.

Saturday 6th, March 2010

Following a query in the Word newsgroups, I have modified the label numbering add-ins to allow for the numbers to be incremented other than by 1.

Thursday 25th, February 2010

Rumour has it that the petrol stations are open again, and while extracting data from a label document for a third party, I found that the macro I posted yesterday had a few problems with the label document I was working on, so having extracted the data I set about a re-write of the macro. It seems to work both with my earlier test documents and the third party's document.

Wednesday 24th, February 2010

The island's petrol station owners have decided to have a strike, as the government has told them to stop over-charging, so to conserve fuel I stayed home and messed around with a macro to accompany the web page 'convert labels to mail merge'.

Saturday 20th, February 2010

Doug Robbins has had a busy week. While working on the Many To One add-in he felt that his MailMerge Excel with Form Fields macro could benefit from some of the techniques included there.

Wednesday 17th, February 2010

Doug Robbins has further enhanced the Office 2007 version of the Many to One add-in to allow Excel 2007 XLSX format data sources to be used as well as Excel 97-2003 XLS format.

Sunday 14th, February 2010

The superstitious might claim that the 13th was an inauspicious day to introduce a new web page and the Many To One add-ins have not been without their teething troubles. I am not superstitious, but I have added code to the Word 2007 version of the add-in to trap the condition where the Outlook spell check before send option is set, as this can cause much user interaction with the add-in. It is not apparently possible to switch off the spell check option with vba, while Outlook is running.

Saturday 13th, February 2010

Doug Robbins has made some modifications to his Many To One mail merge add-ins to provide the option for the merge to be completed to e-mail, with or (in the case of Word 2007) without attachments.

Monday 8th, February 2010

Greg Maxey has been polishing the cannonball, in that he has improved the progress bar used in the invoice project.

Sunday 7th, February 2010

A user pointed out an error in the macro code associated with the Many To One mailmerge add-in and suggested a correction. The code has been updated to reflect this.

Greg Maxey, whilst testing another project he is working on, realised that there was a faster way to update the tables in the invoice template project, so the code in the template has been modified to include it.

Friday 5th February 2010

For what seems like forever, but in reality is only a couple of weeks I have been developing an invoice template project for Word 2007, which finally reached a conclusion when I involved my American friend Greg Maxey. For both of us the problems of creating an invoice that works in Word, when Excel would have been better suited to the calculations involved, proved something of an obsession, and inevitably we had differences of opinion on how it should be presented. We can now share the results of those labours, and hope that someone will find it useful.

Wednesday 27th, January 2010

Added a few lines of code to Sunday's autonumbering macro to enable it to be used with protected forms also.

Sunday 24th, January 2010

Extensively revised the auto numbering of documents page to include an improved routine to number documents, and to reset the number and recycle unused numbers. The previously included code to store the numbers in the registry has been removed from the page.

Sunday 16th, January 2010

Added a group of three similar macro examples to the vba example page, to demonstrate searching and replacing a range of words or phrases in a document from a list in an array or external document containing a table.

Sunday 10th, January 2010

Fellow MVP and regular contributor to this site, Doug Robbins, has come up with a useful add-in to provide the many to one type of mail merge that is so complicated to achieve using Microsoft Word.

Wednesday 6th, January 2010

A Happy New Year to all! My first update of the New Year is to add a useful tip to the Idiot's Guide to Installing Macros, which ensures macros you create are easily stored in the required module.

 

 

 

Friday 25th, December 2009

Escaped from the festivities to wish all a Merry Christmas and to change one of the graphics on the Word 2007 mail merge page.

Friday 18th, December 2009

Paul Edstein has updated his datecalc tutorial.

Wednesday 16th, December 2009

Made minor changes to the macro code to create an initial field for use when merging from Outlook Contacts, in response to a user request to choose from a list of available contacts lists. The macro code features in both the Word 2003 and 2007 mail merge tutorials.

Monday 14th, December 2009

A newsgroup post yesterday raised the issue of inserting autotext/building block entries by name into Word documents. I have therefore added macro code for Word 2007 and earlier versions to the VBA examples page that will insert a named autotext/building block entry whether it is stored in the active template, in an add-in or in the normal template and in the case of Word 2007, Building Blocks.dotx.

Saturday 12th, December 2009

Added a note to the Changing Envelope Layout page to address problems some users have been having with spacing when using Word 2007.

Saturday 5th, December 2009

Improved the macro code associated with the graphics on labels page.

Monday 30th, November 2009

A few more photographs for the 2009 gallery.

Sunday 29th, November 2009

Added Word 2007 illustrations to the character units page, and a few photos to the 2009 gallery.

Monday 16th, November 2009

Added a listing to Friday's new page on the Word Pages.

Friday 13th, November 2009

I am not by nature a superstitious person, so I don't expect any unusual problems from the envelopes add-in for Word 2007 that I have added to the downloads page attributable to today's date. I have also created a new web page documenting the add-in.

Sunday 8th, November 2009

Removed two old and redundant pages and updated the donations links on all pages to allow donations to be made in US$, GB£ and Euros in response to user feedback.

Saturday 7th, November 2009

A minor modification to the field structure created by the macro that creates the footer in the Catchwords page

Saturday 31st, October 2009

Whilst working on the splitmerge add-in and its creation of PDF files I discovered a method of establishing whether the Microsoft Office 2007 PDF plug-in was installed, that had hitherto eluded me. I have therefore updated the Word 2007 version of the splitmerge add-in to incorporate the extra code and thereby allow the plug-in to be used by default if present. I have also updated the associated web page to cover the changes wrought by this edition.

I also felt it worth updating the add-in to merge the documents created by the splitmerge add-in as e-mail attachments to allow the user to choose the document format of the created documents, thus allowing PDF files to be merged as attachments. I have not added the full range of document formats to the Word 2007 version of the add-in, but if there is a demand for it, it would be easy to add the extra choices. Again the associated web page has been updated to reflect the changes.

Friday 30th, October 2009

A user reported that in some circumstances when using the splitmerge add-in in conjunction with Word 2007 and the Microsoft PDF plug-in, the files could be mis-named. I have added some extra error correction to eliminate the particular issue that was causing the problem - hopefully without introducing further issues. The changes only affect the Word 2007 version of the add-in.

Friday 23rd, October 2009

As autumn temperatures start to cool the mountains, it will be time to tackle some of the longer walks, In the meantime I have added a few photographs from the first few km of the Atalante Trail near Troodos. This 14km path around Mount Olympos offers some splendid views, which sadly photography never manages to do justice to. I will add some more after my next visit.

Tuesday 13th, October 2009

Friend Greg Maxey has pointed out that my transposition macro required the Typing Replaces Selection option to be set. While this is the default setting for Word, I thought it worth making the small change to the macro that he suggested, to avoid the need to change that setting .

Monday 12th, October 2009

In response to a user request, I have modified the transposition macro posted yesterday to transpose the characters either side of the cursor, and introduced more error checking for those cases when the cursor is not between two characters.

Add a line of clarification to the Idiot's Guide To Installing Macros in response to a user request.

Sunday 11th, October 2009

There is no function in Word to transpose the order of two characters - a function that has been available in some word processing software since before Windows found its way onto the home computer. I have added a macro to the vba examples page to correct that omission

Wednesday 7th, October 2009

Despite warnings in large face, red coloured, bold type, some users still managed to install the splitmerge add-in incorrectly, so I have changed the way the add-ins are stored in the zip file. It still means that users need to pay attention to installing only the required version, but at least it is now more difficult for users to extract the add-in and its containing folder.

Tuesday 6th, October 2009

In response to a user request I have added the option to save the documents created by the Word 2007 splitmerge add-in to plain text format. The add-in is otherwise identical to the previous version posted on Saturday. The Word 2003 version has not been changed.

Saturday 3rd, October 2009

Added more descriptive dialogs associated with the additional error trapping introduced yesterday to the splitmerge add-ins to demonstrate the likely reasons for the errors that were trapped. Some further changes to the error trapping to allow the same module to be used for both versions of the add-in.  The associated web page has been updated to include illustrations of the additional dialogs.

Friday 2nd, October 2009

Error trapped an obscure fault condition in the splitmerge add-ins caused by incorrect use of the macros.

Thursday 1st, October 2009

Made some minor changes to yesterdays macro to clear the recent files list, and improved the macro to extract acronyms on the VBA examples page.

Wednesday 30th, September 2009

The macros in the extract data from form fields page all featured Word legacy form fields. In response to user requests, I have added code to cover the use of Word 2007 content control fields.

I also modified the clear the recently used file list page to include a macro for Word 2007 that allows the user to retain the items pinned to the recent file list, when the list is cleared; however thanks to an internet connection problem, apparently caused by bad weather, the update may not reach the live web site until tomorrow ... or later

Tuesday 29th, September 2009

Fixed a bug in the 'print a batch of documents' add-ins.

Monday 28th, September 2009

Fixed minor bugs in the 'save to two locations macros' and the 'save a copy to flash' macro; and a more serious bug in the 'copy to flash' macro on the 'Automatically Backup Word Documents' page.

Added a new (and long overdue) page to cover the use of the long established boiler add-in. The add-in does include a full description of its use, but the reasons why I had not previously prepared an associated web page are lost in the mists of time.

Sunday 27th, September 2009

Again a newsgroup question has inspired the creation of a new page and add-in to print a batch of documents in any selected order.

Monday 21st, September 2009

Inspired by a recent newsgroup question, I have developed the macro code on the Extract Data From Forms page to encompass a complete process for collecting data from Word forms returned by e-mail.

Sunday 20th, September 2009

Added a note to the Idiots Guide to Macros to cover the use of references to other program object libraries.

Sunday 13th, September 2009

Updated and improved macro code added to the 'stop automatic date updating' page.

Saturday 12th, September 2009

Some small changes to the ribbon associated with the splitmerge add-in, and the changes documented on the associated web page.

Added a new page with instructions for an add-in to create a mail merge with attachments comprising the documents produced by the splitmerge add-in.

Monday 31st, August 2009

Updated the Mail Merge Graphics page with respect to correct a problem related to updating fields when the merge is to a new document.

Friday 28th, August 2009

Based on recent user feedback I have further clarified the installation instructions for the splitmerge add-in.

Sunday 16th, August 2009

Increased the prominence of a note on the Replace Using Wildcards page to cover a common error when assembling wildcard strings.

Thursday 30th, July 2009

Paul Edstein has updated his catalog/directory merge tutorial once again to simplify the merge to e-mail process and added an example showing how to shade alternate rows in a table merge.

Saturday 4th, July 2009

The graphics on the popup calendar page have been renamed to avoid interference with Kaspersky's pop-up blocker.

I have added two macro functions to create reports from data gathered in a protected form using different approaches.

Monday 29th, June 2009

Fellow MVP Paul Edstein recently came up with a means of merging graphics that did not require a two stage process to merge to a new document and then update the fields. I have thus modified the page on merging graphics to encompass this relatively simple solution.

Paul also suggested an alternative method for merging date fields, based on his experiments with graphics. I have therefore added this to the suggested methods of merging date fields shown on the formatting fields page.

Finally Paul has updated his catalog mail merge tutorial.

Sunday 28th, June 2009

A whole day without problems from the splitmerge add-in!

I have completely revised the page that demonstrates a method of printing a letter document created from a template that includes header/footer information, on pre-printed letter headed paper, without printing the letterhead information from the document.

Saturday 27th, June 2009

Still struggling with finding a location for the settings file for the splitmerge add-in that will please all users, so I have introduced an additional function to locate the 'My Documents' folder and place the settings file there. I have also taken the opportunity to rename the settings file for the 2003 version to match that of the 2007 version - i.e. 'Settings.ini'. This means that both Word versions can now share the same file. Word 2007 writes several extra lines to that settings file, which are ignored by the 2003 version. I wonder how long this version will last before someone finds a problem with that location?

Friday 26th, June 2009

It has been a week of headaches with the splitmerge add-in. The decision to place the settings file in the root of the C: drive for the 2003 version, where it had been saved in some earlier versions, quickly ran into difficulties, with business systems that did not allow write access to that location. Trying to find a location that works consistently from Word 2003, and is available to all users, has been a persistent problem. The latest version (42) saves the file in the root folder of the user environment area. This has not been tested with all Windows versions, so how long it will be before someone runs into problems I hesitate to guess.

Thursday 25th, June 2009

The splitmerge add-in has continued to produce headaches from the the 2003 version. The code has now been fixed to overcome the error, and the code duplicated in the 2007 version which did not exhibit the same problem, for ease of future maintenance. The 2003 version now creates its settings file in the root of the C: drive.

Wednesday 24th, June 2009

Corrected another problem in the splitmerge add-in that affected documents to be split into folders determined by a field in the data source.

Unfortunately, when you turn over a stone more bugs run out, so if you downloaded the revisions earlier today, ensure that you have the latest version of the above add-in.

Tuesday 23rd, June 2009

Made some changes to the macro code to save a document to two locations, and added an alternative version of the macro to allow the backup location to be selected each time.

The merge to individual documents add-in required a further update. Complex merge documents comprising several sections, each of which may have a different arrangement of headers/footers, caused Word to crash when the the process was run. This has now been addressed and hopefully fixed.

In addition there was a problem which occurred with merge documents that had the read-only security option set, when the macro to create a template from the document was run. This too has been addressed. New versions of both the Word 2002-3 and 2007 are now included in the downloadable file.

Thursday 11th, June 2009

Updated the boiler.zip file to include a new version of the add-in for Word 2007 c/w an activation button on the Insert tab of the ribbon. The alternative version is unchanged but renamed to avoid confusion. The 2002-3 version remains compatible with Word 2007 if preferred. The readme file (included in the zip) has been updated to reflect the changes.

Friday 6th, June 2009

Added several more pictures to the 2009 gallery

Sunday 31st, May 2009

Added a couple of pictures to the 2009 gallery.

Friday 22nd, May 2009

More from Paul Edstein with an update of the date calculation tutorial with further attention to calculating the last day of a month.

Thursday 21st, May 2009

Paul Edstein has further revised his catalog mail merge tutorial to demonstrate merging to e-mail.

Thursday 14th, May 2009

Posted an updated version of Paul Edstein's catalog mail merge tutorial.

Monday 4th, May 2009

I have fixed a minor wording anomaly in one of the lesser used dialogs in the splitmerge add-ins (that had been overlooked from the first release) and added an illustration of the dialog box to the associated web page. Whilst doing so I spotted another minor anomaly related to the location of the settings files. Neither error warranted a new release number for the add-in file, but the version available for download has been changed to reflect the correct wording in the dialog.

Unfortunately in investigating this issue, another related bug was revealed. This one had also managed to evade 38 versions of the add-in, but as it entails changes to the core code, I have now created new versions in which the error has been corrected.

Saturday 2nd, May 2009

Thousands of people access the material from this web site daily. Most just leach the material they want and run. That's OK, provided they are not selling on the material as their own, however the costs of running the site are rising and in order to continue to be able to provide this resource, I have enlarged the contribution section on each page and added a background colour to make it stand out. If your business gains from the material you have used, then a donation while not obligatory, would be appreciated.

I have made a small modification to the Works Converter add-in code, in response to user feedback.

In response to user feedback I have modified the splitmerge add-ins to allow the user to enter a filename when the record used for the filename contains restricted characters that may not be used in a filename such as / \ : * ? " < > |.

Friday 1st, May 2009

A user reported an obscure bug in the splitmerge add-ins. This has been corrected and the revised versions are now available.

Wednesday 29th, April 2009

Added a batch converter for Works WPS format documents to DOCX format.

Added an address with respect to user feedback for Paul Edstein's field tutorials which you can download from the downloads page.

Monday 20th, April 2009

A new page to address the issue of documents not being found when their filenames are clicked from Windows/Vista Explorer.

Tuesday 14th, April 2009

Paul Edstein has updated his catalog/mailmerge tutorial to include more material on merging to tables.

Added a minor note of clarification to the Custom Labels page with respect to Word 2007.

Sunday 12th, April 2009

Updated and improved macro code added to the format fraction page.

Saturday 11th, April 2009

A new page showing how to convert PDF files to Word document format using only the PDF reader and tools provided with Microsoft Office.

Monday 6th, April 2009

Made a few minor updates to the Vinyl to CD tutorial and to the What to do when Word crashes page.

Sunday 5th, April 2009

For some time, the Rotate Text page has been the most visited page on this web site. I have therefore updated the page to include Word 2007 related graphics and added some detail to cover some anomalies that occur when using Word 2007.

Saturday 4th, April 2009

Following user feedback from the recent update to the splitmerge add-in, I have included, in the Word 2007 version, the option to save the split documents in a variety of formats. The current version for Word 2007 is therefore Version 36. Version 34 for for earlier Word versions remains unaffected.

Wednesday 25th, March 2009

In Version 34 of the mail merge splitter for Word 2007 that I uploaded on Monday, merges to PDF were configured to use the Office 2007 PDF plug-in. Earlier versions required Adobe Acrobat and Doug had included code to test for the presence of the the Adobe PDF driver which I had made redundant in Version 34. In hindsight that seemed a little cavalier, so I have restored the test for Acrobat in Version 35. If Acrobat is present, that is used to create the PDF files. If not,  the Office 2007 PDF plug-in  is used instead, the user having confirmed that it is available. The web page has been updated to reflect the changes. Note: Version 34 of the splitter for earlier Word versions is unaffected.

Tuesday 24th, March 2009

Fellow MVP Doug Robbins, with whom I have co-operated on a number of projects for this site, has come up with a selection of macros for combining protected forms with mail merge fields, to produce similar forms, some of the areas of which are populated from a merge data source. I have added some extra functionality to Doug's core code and the macros thus form the basis of a new page.

Monday 23rd, March 2009

Following random complaints from Word 2007 users about problems with the individual merge letters add-in, I have revisited the macros involved and created separate versions for Word 2007 and earlier (Version 34). Both are contained in the same downloadable file. The 2007 version takes advantage of some of the additional features offered in that version.

Sunday 15th, March 2009

Added a macro to the formfields macros page to clear a protected form back to defaults, ready for re-use.

Monday 9th, March 2009

A few more pictures added to to the 2009 photo gallery.

Friday 6th, March 2009

Fellow MVP Greg Maxey pointed out an alternative technique for processing parts of found text strings, so I have incorporated some of his suggestions in the procedure for replacing parts of a string in a list of words and the simpler macro which preceded it.

Thursday 5th, March 2009

Posted an update to fellow MVP Paul Edstein's  word field maths tutorial and uploaded his new catalogue mailmerge tutorial to the downloadable files area.

Wednesday 4th, March 2009

Nothing appears for ages then three come at once! This time it is a procedure for replacing parts of a string in a list of words e.g. for subscripting numbers in chemical formulae.

Tuesday 3rd, March 2009

A new Word page to demonstrate a method of printing a letter document which includes the letterhead, to pre-printed stationery, which includes the same letter head.

Monday 2nd, March 2009

Doesn't time fly? It's been a while since I added anything to the site. Today I added an alternative method of adding a row to a table in a protected form to the vba examples page.

Thursday 22nd, January 2009

A user of this web site has pointed out that, like html, Word 2007's docx format comprises a number of elements, including a folder containing the images used in the document. It is therefore possible to extract images directly from docx format documents. I have therefore edited the extract images web page to reflect this.

Wednesday 21st, January 2009

Added a brief note of direction to the Idiots Guide To Macros for the benefit of those who skip read instructions!

Added the first of the pictures to the 2009 gallery.

Saturday 17th, January 2009

A new page demonstrates how to batch print a set of envelopes for a number of letters saved to a folder.

Saturday 3rd, January 2009

First update of the New Year is a modification to the code to change printers in the envelope and label tools of Word 2003 and 2007, to correct an omission that did not allow the dialog to pick up the addressee information from the letter.

Created the 2009 photo gallery page (though no new photos yet).

Tuesday 30th, December 2008

Cold and wet here (the wet welcome, the cold less so) so time to add a note of clarification re unicode character searches in the wildcard searches page

Sunday 28th, December 2008

Finishing off the year's changes with a macro to count times added to the vba examples page and a few  more photographs for the 2008 gallery.

Tuesday 23rd, December 2008

Uploaded a few minor revisions to yesterday's label numbering add-ins and changed two of the graphics on the associated web page.

Monday 22nd, December 2008

I have added downloadable add-ins to produce sequentially numbered labels from Word 2007 and earlier, from a collaborative effort with friend and fellow Word MVP Greg Maxey. The add-ins work in conjunction with the standard Word label tool and are fully documented on the Numbered Labels page.

Sunday 21st, December 2008

Two more festive photos added to the 2008 gallery.

Thursday 18th, December 2008

A few more photos for the 2008 gallery

Thursday 11th, December 2008

Added to the envelope layout page a workaround for creating templates for custom envelope sizes.

Wednesday 10th, December 2008

Added another vba example to demonstrate how to colour form field check boxes in a contrasting colour when they are checked.

Monday 8th, December 2008

Added a code example to the vba examples page to demonstrate the duplication of a group of variously formatted texts and form fields dependant on the setting of a control form field.

Sunday 30th, November 2008

Added illustrations to demonstrate the addition of keyboard shortcuts to macros to the Idiots Guide To Macros and a couple of photographs of Christmas decorations at The Paphos Mall.

Saturday 22nd, November 2008

More code examples added to the Individual Merge Letters page.

Tuesday 18th, November 2008

Added a few more photographs to the 2008 gallery.

Monday 17th, November 2008

Further work on the  insertion of variable text into a protected form page.

Sunday 16th, November 2008

Yet another addition to the insertion of variable text into a protected form page.

Saturday 15th, November 2008

Added further macro examples to the insertion of variable text into a protected form page, based on the content of a dropdown or check box form field.

Sunday 9th, November 2008

Updated the mail merge with Word 2007 page to clarify a few minor issues raised by user feedback.

Saturday 8th, November 2008

Updated the Remove Password page with respect to the removal of password protection for forms, to reflect changes for Word 2007 and an alternative method for earlier versions.

Made some changes to the field switch macro code on the VBA examples page and removed some duplicated code.

Monday 3rd, November 2008

Added yet more photographs of mountain trails and  the ancient site of Kourion (Curium).

Monday 20th, October 2008

Added some more photographs of the impressive Kaledonia Trail - this time of the more popular lower section, and some photographs of the Kato Paphos coastal path.

Sunday 19th, October 2008

User feedback reported that the boiler.dot add-in did not work in Word 2007 under the Windows Vista operating system. I have located the problem and updated the file available for download. The Word 2000 version included in the zip file has not been changed.

Saturday 18th, October 2008

Added a collection of photographs showing the Kaledonia Trail in all its splendour.

Thursday 9th, October 2008

A note of clarification added to the ASCII search command on the Replace Using Wildcards page.

Tuesday 7th, October 2008

Several photographs added from yesterday's visit to the mountains.

Friday 26th, September 2008

Modified the SQL security check macro code to provide user feedback

Thursday 25th, September 2008

Updated the Text as Bullet page to cater for the differences in Word 2007

Thursday 18th, September 2008

Added a few extra photographs of the Paphos redevelopment area.

Monday 15th, September 2008

Added another vba example to produce bar chart indicators based on the value of a dropdown form field.

Simplified the macro to add a new row to a table in a protected form.

Friday 12th, September 2008

Fellow Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill pointed out another method of extracting images from Word, that she had come across, which appears to be infinitely preferable to the method I had previously recommended, so I have included this as the preferred method; however I have not tested it in all circumstances, so until I get some more feedback I have left the traditional method as an alternative means of extracting images.

Wednesday 10th, September 2008

Fixed a minor bug in the True Title Case macro on the VBA Examples page

Tuesday 9th, September 2008

Fixed a minor error on the Wildcards page, and changed the date in the previous header on this page to show the correct year.

Sunday 7th, September 2008

Added another programming example to the Word VBA Examples page.

Saturday 30th, August 2008

Added more programming code examples to the Word VBA Examples page.

Friday 22nd, August 2008

Added a 'gotcha' to the replace using wildcards page.

Thursday 21st, August 2008

I have added some advertising banners for 1&1, who host this site, to a few key pages, in the forlorn hope that it may generate a little income to help with the running costs of this site. I have also updated the illustration of the Word 2003 mail merge toolbar with notes explaining the functions.

Sunday 17th, August 2008

Added some further code examples to last Satuday's new page of vba examples.

Saturday 9th, August 2008

Occasionally Word forum users come up with macro coding problems that others may find useful, which are not really worth a page of their own. I have therefore added a page to cater for such snippets of code, which I will supplement as suitable examples present themselves.

Monday 14th, July 2008

Added a handful of photographs to the 2008 gallery.

Saturday 12th, July 2008

Word forum users increasingly complain that when opening Word documents they have received by e-mail, they are presented with a converter dialog box filled with garbage. This new page provides one explanation for this problem and the means of preventing it.

Following on from the problems encountered on Wednesday, Doug and I have been trying to discover the cause of the error that affects the use of the macro in Word 2007 without 100% success, but we have made further updates to the macro to create a template for use in conjunction with the Individual Merge Letters add-in that seems to work without further problem.

Please note that the problems leading to the changes only affect Word 2007 merge documents. For merges in Word 2003 and earlier, version 28 of the add-in contains exactly the same code as the current version.

Wednesday 9th, July 2008

User feedback has pointed out that the code to create a merge template, that is an additional function of the Individual Merge Letters add-in, does not work in Word 2007. The problem may be attributable to a security update, as it certainly worked when originally created. I will investigate further and attempt to establish a workaround. In the meantime I have disabled the function for Word 2007 and updated the add-in available for download. If you already have version 28 of the add-in and are using Word 2007, simply ignore the function, or replace the add-in with temporary version 29.

12.30pm and I have fixed the problem. It appears to only affect merge documents in Word 2007 "docx" format. Changing the function to create working documents in 97-2003 compatibility mode will work, and for version 30 now available, this is what I have done. If this becomes a problem with documents that include Word 2007 features, I may have to further re-appraise the issue.

Saturday 28th, June 2008

Added a new page which demonstrates how to extract the content or attachments of an e-mail message to a Word document.

Monday 16th, June 2008

Added several pictures to the 2008 gallery.

Wednesday 11th, June 2008

Another issue raised in the Word forums concerned the extraction of data from Word forms for use in a spreadsheet. A new page - Extract Data From Forms - demonstrates one approach to the problem.

Saturday 7th, June 2008

Inspired by my answer to a problem posed in the Word forums I have added a page containing macros that enable autotext entries to be maintained in a Word table.

Wednesday 4th, June 2008

Added a few photographs of the delightful Kelefos Bridge.

Wednesday 28th, May 2008

Some photographs from the Cyprus mountains.

Saturday 24th, May 2008

Modified the instructions with relation to using gmail as an e-mail washer.

Friday 2nd, May 2008

Following user feedback, the original macro code to select printer trays on the 'print to a specific printer' page was ignored by Word 2007 and frequently crashed Word 2003. I have therefore altered the tray selection from 'by name' to 'by tray ID' and have added a method of identifying the tray ID numbers.

Thursday 1st, May 2008

Updates to Paul Edstein's datecalc and word field maths downloadable files.

Friday 25th, April 2008

Following user feedback, added an extra illustration to the page relating to the recovery of edited Outlook attachments.

Added a few more photos of the Kato Paphos re-development.

Sunday 20th, April 2008

Yet more photos added to the 2008 gallery

Sunday 13th, April 2008

Updated the macro code to extract data from similar documents, to incorporate an improved folder selection routine and to simplify the data entry into the storage document.

Saturday 12th, April 2008

Yet more photos of the Kato Paphos redevelopment area.

Thursday 3rd, April 2008

Two more photos added to the 2008 gallery.

Wednesday 2nd, April 2008

Added an extra example to the formatting switches page, to clarify the formatting of telephone numbers.

Monday 31st, March 2008

Paul Edstein's excellent datecalc document has been updated to demonstrate the calculation of a date sequence/series on page 11. The revised document Version 2_70 is now available for download.

Tuesday 25th, March 2008

Added a few more photographs.

(Roman) Easter Monday 24th, March 2008

Work continues relentlessly on the Paphos re-development as shown in a couple of new photographs.

Thursday 20th, March 2008

Added a page 'Associate Printer' which features a Word add-in to associate the printer name required for a document with that document.

Tuesday 18th, March 2008

In conjunction with fellow Word MVP Doug Robbins who wrote the original merge splitter add-in, I have added an updated version of the add-in which overcomes the problems associated with merge documents that use templates other than the normal template. The web page has been updated to encompass the changes in the add-in.

Saturday 15th, March 2008

Added a few more photographs of the Kato Paphos redevelopment.

Tuesday 4th, March 2008

Updated the boiler.dot documentation, both supplied with the add-in and separately as a PDF download. Fixed a minor bug in the Word 2002 to Word 2007 version of the add-in.

Monday 3rd, March 2008

Modified the macro code to backup documents to a flash drive and added an alternative simpler version of the code.

Sunday 2nd, March 2008

Added a couple more pictures to the 2008 Gallery.

Wednesday 27th, February 2008

Having just received my excess charges bill for web traffic for the month, I had to go for a lie down - and then I did some pruning of old and unnecessary stuff, starting with the comedy downloads that were getting a little dated, and some of the graphics that were linked to external forums. I must get around to sorting out the old images, but in the meantime I have up-rated my traffic allowance with the web service provider.

Monday 25th, February 2008

A few more photos of the Kato Paphos redevelopment.

Saturday 23rd, February 2008

A few more photographs added to the 2008 gallery. Updated the Batch Replace macro code to improve the file selection dialog and to include mods. suggested by Greg Maxey to ensure that text in shapes in the header/footer is addressed.

Saturday 9th, February 2008

An overnight message in the Word programming forum prompted me to resurrect an idea for establishing whether a printer was available before choosing that printer and printing to it. The macro requires code from Astrid Zeelenberg available at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/AvailablePrinters.htm.

Tuesday 5th, February 2008

Photographs from the completed Chlorakas section of the new coastal path that will eventually run from Paphos Airport to the coastal village of St. Georges.

Sunday 3rd, February 2008

A few more photos of the Kato Paphos re-development.

Friday 1st, February 2008

I have been using Diskeeper 2008 for a couple of months now to keep my hard drives free from fragmentation. This is an excellent product that does exactly what it says on the tin. How boring is that? I have been so impressed that I have added a link to the favourites page, or simply click the link in this entry.

Sunday 27th, January 2008

Pedestrians were allowed access to the Kato Paphos redevelopment site for the first time since work started, so I have taken the opportunity to add a raft of photos.

Friday 25th, January 2008

Minor change to the page about inserting PDF files into Word as graphics.

Thursday 24th, January 2008

Minor changes to the formfield validation macro to simplify the adding of the macros to the fields.

A few more photographs for the 2008 Gallery.

Saturday 19th, January 2008

A few extra photos of the Kato Paphos redevelopment added to the 2008 Gallery.

Friday 18th, January 2008

Prompted by user feedback, I have added an alternative method of extracting images from Word, using PowerPoint as a vehicle to save the image.

Saturday 5th, January 2008

The first new photograph of 2008 prompted the addition of a new photo gallery.

Thursday 3rd, January 2008

The first edits of 2008 are to the envelope/label printing macros which enable the use of different printers when printing envelopes and labels, with additional code to cater for Word 2007.

Monday 31st, December 2007

Finishing the year with a new page to help those having problems opening Word 2007 docx format documents in earlier Word versions.

Saturday 29th, December 2007

Probably the last photographs of 2007 added to the 2006/7 gallery.

Friday 28th, December 2007

The updated versions of the mail merge PDF documents have been uploaded to the downloads page. I have also changed the titles of the web pages they duplicate (though not the URLs as this would impact on the search engines) to reflect that the pages concern more than simply merging to labels. Labels were used as an example because they involve the most complexity.

Thursday 27th, December 2007

A few more photographs for the 2006/7 gallery. Following on from yesterday's update to the Word 2007 merge page, it appears that the same method can, with one small proviso, be used from Word 2003, so I have added a note of explanation to the Word 2002/3 merge page. I will update the PDF versions in due course.

Wednesday 26th, December 2007

Further to the addition to the mail merge pages on the 16th December, the same method could be used with Word 2007  to make the contents of the Categories field available to an Outlook merge from Word, by using the same macro code to copy the contents of the Categories field to one of the unused Outlook user fields.

Wednesday 19th, December 2007

Some users of older versions of Word have reported that the boiler.dot add-in crashes with an error. This is because the folder selection routine used only works with recent Word versions (tested with Word 2003 and 2007). I have therefore posted a version in the same zip file that has a folder selection routine which is less elegant, but which does work. If you have problems, use the alternative version.

Sunday 16th, December 2007

Users of mail merge have frequently bemoaned the fact that Outlook contacts does not have a field that produces the contacts' forename initial, which is frequently useful when addressing envelopes etc. It is possible, but not very convenient to use one of the four User fields to store the initial. I have therefore added an Outlook macro to both the Word 2002/3 and 2007 mail merge pages which writes the derives the initial from the FirstName fields and writes it to the User4 fields of the complete contacts list.

Add the macro to a button on the Outlook toolbar and it is a simple matter to update the fields when new records are added. It takes but a few seconds to run on a list of several hundred records.

Monday 10th, December 2007

It became clear today that users attempting to apply Microsoft's downloadable templates to the process of mailmerge are confused by the text already present in those templates. I have therefore added a section to the mail merge to labels with Word 2002/3 and 2007 pages hopefully clarifying the issue.

Friday 7th, December 2007

A few more progress pictures of the Kato Paphos re-development.

Wednesday 5th, December 2007

Updated some images on the macrobutton tutorial.

Monday 27th, November 2007

I took a few more photos of the Kato Paphos developments yesterday and added two of them to the gallery. One of our remaining two cats has been very sick, but with the assistance of the vet we managed to pull him round. He has been taking full advantage of his new lease of life.

Wednesday 26th, November 2007

Work has begun on the long awaited redevelopment of the Kato Paphos shoreline causing massive disruption, which will continue for at least three months. If you plan to visit Paphos before Easter 2008, the photos show something of what you may expect to find. I will add to them as work progresses.

Sunday 25th, November 2007

Testing Friday's version of Doug's split merge add-in revealed an obscure bug that had been present from the start and which may have been the cause of some of the odd failures that one or two users have reported. Following a merge to separate files, if you then merged to printer without restarting Word the merge completed with an error that stopped the add-in from working. This has now been fixed and version 25 of the add-in is now available for download.

Saturday 24th, November 2007

User feedback has pointed out that the possibility for changing the default location that Word looks for its mail merge data sources was not quite as rigid as I had suggested in the mail merge pages for Word 2002/3 and 2007. This has now been corrected.

Friday 23rd, November 2007

Doug has done some more work on the problematic area of the mail merge splitter add-in MMtoDocs.zip, Version 24 now available to download has some neater code, but essentially does the same as version 23. This is not a 'must have' upgrade if you already picked up version 23 since yesterday morning.

Thursday 22nd, November 2007

User feedback has reported an issue with version 22 of Doug Robbins' mail merge splitter add-in, previously contained in MMtoDocs.zip, where the field chosen for the filename has more than one entry with the same data, which caused the add-in to crash. A bug had crept in when I modified the data to make the add-in compatible with Word 2007 that was missed during tests. This problem was not present in version 20 so if you are running that one with versions of Word before 2007, then there is no need to do anything.

Doug and I have been working on a fix, the results of which are now available to download. For 2007 users and new users, version 23 should fix the problem. If you have any difficulties with this one, please report back.

Thursday 15th, November 2007

Changed the folder selection dialog in the boiler.dot add-in to clarify the dialog function.

Thursday 8th, November 2007

With assistance from friend and fellow MVP Greg Maxey, the boiler.dot add-in now provides for multiple files to be selected at once and for selected files to be re-ordered before adding them to the document.

Thursday 4th, October 2007

Made a few small changes to the graphics on the formatting Word fields with switches page in relation to ZIP codes.

Monday 2nd, October 2007

I awoke this morning to two pieces of good news:

I have been re-awarded MVP status for another year, for my contributions to the Microsoft Word community, and PayPal has finally (and seemingly grudgingly) recognized that Cyprus is an EU member state and has accorded its residents some of the privileges of other member states, in that we now have the limited ability to receive payments. So I have re-added a link to the header of each page, to enable those desperate to make a contribution to be able to do so

Sunday 23rd, September 2007

Paul Edstein has done some minor editing and added a bit on displaying graphics at print time to his Date Calc document. His Word Field Maths document has also been revised, with the addition of items on 'Calculations In Word Forms' and 'Identifying Cell Addresses'.

The http://www.wopr.com web site is now back on line and the documents are also available from there.

Also added a few photographs to the 2006/7 gallery.

Saturday 22nd, September 2007

Following a number of newsgroup reports from Word 2007 users, about the issue of disappearing page headers, which hitherto was believed only to affect Word 2003, I have updated the relevant page to cover Word 2007 also.

Monday 17th, September 2007

The house sale seems to be well on its way to completion, so I have taken a chance and removed the advertisement. It can easily be resurrected from my backup if it all goes wrong at the final hurdle . I also took the opportunity to consolidate some of my photo galleries. The 2005 gallery was rather small, so I added it to the end of the 2004 gallery, and I have edited the 2006/7 gallery to mark the start of 2007.

Saturday 15th, September 2007

Added a page to demonstrate the insertion of a date selected using a pop-up calendar control to a form or document. The calendar control may not be available in some versions of Office so the ActiveX controls to make this work have been added to the downloads page.

Thursday 13th, September 2007

We have accepted an offer on our house for sale so I have added a 'Sold subject to contract' note to the page. I have also added a note to the Word 2007 toolbars page concerning unusual behaviour when used with Outlook.

Monday 3rd, September 2007

On the 24th, August, I changed the feedback link to a feedback form. I didn't like the way that this worked and so I have changed it back to link to my support e-mail address, using your own e-mail software, until I can get around to improving the form.

Sunday 2nd, September 2007

While looking at the boiler.dot add-in in response to a user query, I decided to add a check box to the user form to eliminate an untidy input box to allow the user to choose whether to insert the documents on separate pages, and took the opportunity to update the readme file to include Word 2007 related illustrations.. 

Monday 27th, August 2007

Updated Doug Robbins' add-in to merge to separate documents with code to enable it to work with both Word 2003 & 2007.

Sunday 26th, August 2007

Pasting macro code from Word's vba editor into FrontPage loses all the layout and colours. I spent a happy few hours this morning adding colour and indents to all the macros featured on the site, in an attempt to make them even easier to follow. Even so I am bound to have missed something.

Saturday 25th, August 2007

Attended to some 'housekeeping' - fixed some broken links and tidied up a couple of macros. Nothing worth directing attention to at this juncture. Note that as of today www.wopr.com (see previous entry) is still down

Credit goes to fellow MVP Herb Tyson for discovering the ability to scan directly into Word 2007 - a function that appeared to have been left out of the application.

Friday 24th, August 2007

Following the crash of www.wopr.com, from which could be downloaded fellow MVP Paul Edstein's impressive works on field date calculations and mathematics, I have offered to host the two documents on this site. They are now available from the downloads page.

I have also replaced the feedback link on my home page with a form. This is to cut down abuse by spammers. I will not respond to any unsolicited mail to my web site address that does not use this form. The form does not accept attachments.

Saturday 18th, August 2007

Fellow MVP Beth Melton has pointed out that I have misunderstood the process whereby Word 2007 adds spacing on labels created using mail merge. This doesn't affect the procedure illustrated on my web page on mail merge with Word 2007, but I felt it worth putting the record straight with an additional note of explanation.

Monday 13th, August 2007

It has been pointed out to me that on yesterday's new page, I suggested that it was necessary for your mail server to be able to re-direct mail to GMail. This is not strictly true. GMail will in fact collect your mail from another five accounts! I have added the extra steps to make this happen. It was also pointed out that I had missed a setup step in the configuring Outlook instructions. This was because a similar dialog is used for both Outlook and Outlook Express and I missed its duplication. Enough of the excuses. That too is now fixed.

Sunday 12th, August 2007

If you frequent the web and especially newsgroup forums and use your real e-mail address in a web page or forum, it will only be a matter of time before you start to receive loads of e-mail inviting you to enlarge your penis, surgically enhance your breasts, buy drugs that you didn't know you needed and a raft of other nonsense. This takes up your time and bandwidth, but all is not lost. Thanks to a suggestion by fellow MVP Juan T. Llibre you can overcome the problem by using Google Gmail either as a your main POP e-mail account or as a means of washing the e-mail sent to your existing account. In order to do this, the only requirement is that your existing e-mail account must offer the facility to automatically re-direct mail to another address. This new page explains how to set it up.

Monday 6th, August 2007

Made some changes to the macro code for clearing the recent files list to provide a single macro that works with both Word 2007 and earlier versions.

Monday 30th, July 2007

Added a note to the lost Outlook attachments page to cover the new behaviour of Office 2007.

Sunday 29th, July 2007

Added a few notes relating to Office 2007, to the Mail Merge from Outlook page, and I have moved a couple of cat pictures to the appropriate gallery from the 2007 gallery and updated the story in pictures of our feral cat family.

Thursday 26th, July 2007

Some more drought pictures added to the photo gallery

Sunday 22nd, July 2007

Simplified the presentation of the calculation to present cash amounts in words.

Friday 20th, July 2007

When updating the web pages at the start of the month, to accommodate the changes to accommodate Word 2007, I appear to have overlooked the mail merge graphics page. That omission has now been rectified. Also added a couple more photos.

Sunday 15th, July 2007

In response to user feedback I have made a few small modifications to the Idiots Guide to Macros to attempt to make it even easier for the beginner to understand.

Saturday 14th, July 2007

Added a few more pictures from Thursday's trip to the mountains.

Tuesday 10th, July 2007

Added an experimental local temperature indicator to the home page and house sale page. Added a few pictures to the 2007 Gallery.

Wednesday 4th, July 2007

Added a new page which demonstrates how to install the Office 2003 proofing tools for use with Office 2007 (an Office 2003 installation disc is required).

Monday 2nd, July 2007

Completed the addition of Word 2007 updates where applicable: Alternative Return Addresses, Replace Using Wildcards, Word Text to Speech, and What To Do When Word Crashes. The PDF versions of the Mail Merge, Switches and Convert Labels To A Data File have all been revised. If you spot any oddities or errors, please let me know.

Sunday 1st, July 2007

Added links to Fellow MVP Patrick Schmid's Word 2007 related web site and blog, where you will find his excellent ribbon customizer.

Updated Autotext Replace, Convert Labels to Mail Merge, Individual Merge Letters, Select File from Dropdown Form Field and Graphics On Labels to add Word 2007 dialogs.

Saturday 30th, June 2007

Added a new page which shows how to run Word 2003 (earlier versions should work too) alongside the new Word 2007, without conflict; and how to retain the toolbar buttons from 2003 for use in Word 2007.

Updated a number of pages to display Word 2007 dialogs, where relevant, as part of an ongoing process to include Word 2007 instructions wherever possible.

Friday 29th, June 2007

Modified the envelope editing page to include setting up a document to use window envelopes (albeit this has little to do with changing envelope layouts).

Wednesday 27th, June 2007

Modified the envelope editing page and the macrobutton page to take account of the changes for Word 2007, and added a few more pictures to the 2006/7 gallery.

Monday 25th, June 2007

Modified the two macros for saving numbered versions of documents for improved compatibility with Word 2007 whilst maintaining compatibility with earlier versions.

Updated the envelope samples for improved compatibility with Word 2007 and added error trapping.

Added error trapping to the macros to insert entries from Outlook on the Macrobutton page.

Sunday 24th, June 2007

Added a note to the mail merge labels with Word 2007 page concerning the default use of paragraph styles. and updated some of the images.

Saturday 23rd, June 2007

Added a few photographs from Thursday's trip to the mountains.

Wednesday 20th, June 2007

The temperatures outside are soaring so I have used the extra time indoors to add another page on the subject of mail merge, this time for Word 2007. This is essentially the same information as posted in the popular Mail Merge to Labels with Office XP & 2003 page, but showing the dialogs for the new Word version.

Tuesday 19th, June 2007

Created a new page to demonstrate how to Create Outlook Entries From Word

Added a note to the Individual Merge Letters page with reference to the use of templates with the split letters.

Saturday 16th, June 2007

Added illustration to the Individual Merge Letters page showing the dialog for Acrobat 8

Tuesday 12th, June 2007

Added a note to the mail merge labels page to explain how to use a label template not listed in the envelopes and labels dialog.

Added a note to the custom labels page to take account of the differences presented by Word 2007.

Also added a couple more photos to the 2006/7 Gallery

Sunday 10th, June 2007

Updated the 'Idiot's Guide to Macros' to display also the dialogs for Word 2007.

Monday 4th, June 2007

Minor modifications added to the macro to duplicate graphics across all the cells of a table to restore the original display of field codes.

Friday 1st, June 2007

Added a new page to demonstrate a method of extracting data from a series of similar documents.

Friday 11th, May 2007

It appears that recent security updates (sadly I don't know which one) have conspired to prevent the Excel filter from saving Word documents in Excel format - which is a shame. The filter will still open Excel format files.

Saturday 28th, April 2007

Corrected a typo (thanks to user feedback) on the Alternative Return Addresses page.

Thursday 26th, April 2007

Back from a couple of weeks visiting family in the UK and Ireland and an opportunity to record several images for the photo sections on Wales - to include pictures of Llandudno, Colwyn Bay and Harlech - and several additions to the Ireland gallery.

Easter Sunday 8th, April 2007

Added a few pictures from last night's celebrations.

Good Friday 6th, April 2007

Added some further descriptions to my House For Sale page

Monday 2nd, April 2007

Added a link to the downloads page.

Friday 30th, March 2007

Fellow MVP and frequent contributor to this site, Doug Robbins, has come up with a vba solution to the problem of Word's inability to fully propagate labels when use on a Tablet PC (and now seemingly some others).

Tuesday 20th, March 2007

Added a note to the mail merge graphics web page concerning paths being changed when merging to a new document.

Thursday 15th, March 2007

Added a sentence of explanation to the duplex merge page for the benefit of those who don't know what to do with add-in templates.

Monday 12th, March 2007

A small addition to the Word field code formatting page, to demonstrate lower case on am/pm switches.

Saturday 10th, March 2007

Added some further error trapping in the boiler.dot macro code, and corrected a few typos in the Duplex Postcards page uploaded yesterday.

Friday 9th, March 2007

Following some discussion in the Word mail merge forum about the implementation of duplex merges to postcards, fellow MVP Doug Robbins and I came up with some ideas about the implementation of a macro to convert a data file to create such merges. Although the end results were the same, Doug's code was somewhat more elegant than mine, so that has been incorporated into the macro. The explanation takes the form of a new page, accompanied by an add-in to download.

Friday 2nd, March 2007

Added a page with macro code to change DATE fields in a document or template (or batch of documents or templates) to CREATEDATE fields, to overcome the common problem of unwanted updating of the date in a document.

Wednesday 28th, February 2007

Still picking up the pieces from Monday's server error. I have corrected a minor error in the boiler.zip file and removed some redundant material from the downloads page.

Tuesday 27th, February 2007

Anyone accessing my web site today may have found a catalogue of horrors thanks to my Web service provider, One and One, who managed to screw up most of my pages and lose a few others. After telephoning their support (twice), I failed to find a solution. The best they could come up with was to remove the Front Page extensions and use the ftp server to update the site.

So half a day wasted, the updated files - without the extensions - are now live. Fingers crossed there will be no more excitement.

Please report any anomalies.

I have also made some modifications to the boiler.dot downloadable file. I found that the routine to display the filenames did not work reliably, and not at all in Word 2007. The new version should address that. It also now includes the option to insert the documents each to a new page with a new page section break.

Sunday 25th, February 2007

Borrowing again from Doug Robbins macro examples, I have added a further example of automatic document numbering to my page on that topic. This is in acknowledgement that the method shown on that page stores the numbering sequence in the Windows registry. For a multi-user application, this method is inappropriate, so I have included macro code that will save the number sequence in an ini file.

Wednesday 7th, February 2007

Doug Robbins has updated the split merge add-in to test for the correct type of merge document (i.e the add-in is intended to work only with form letter merges)

Monday 5th, February 2007

Added a link to the Dataviz Conversions Plus web site to the Word filters downloads section. This is, as far as I am aware, the only third party Word filter for Lotus Word Pro documents currently available.

I have also added a few more cat pictures to the Cats gallery.

Saturday 27th, January 2007

Added a few photos to the 2006/7 gallery.

Wednesday 23rd, January 2007

As this site becomes more widely usedImages_2004/112-1245_IMG.jpg (currently over 3000 hits a day) the additional traffic costs of running the site increase, therefore to help defray those costs, I have reluctantly taken the decision to add some discreet advertising with the aid of Google Ad Sense, and have taken the opportunity to add Google's search engine to search this site or the wider web, in place of the search facility that I previously employed, which required extra work to maintain. The results can be seen at the top of this page.

Monday 22nd, January 2007

Fellow MVP Paul Edstein who uses the pseudonym 'Macropod', and whose mathematical skills far outweigh mine, suggested some alternative ways of handling negative numbers in calculations. I have added those suggestions to the appropriate page.

Saturday 20th, January 2007

Added a couple more cat photos.

Saturday 13th, January 2007

Added code to the sample auto macros to fix the problem encountered in Word 2003 where the cursor shrinks for no apparent reason.

Following improvements to Acrobat 7 Professional's add-in for Word, I have revised the Acrobat toolbar web page, to take account of the changes.

Thursday 4th, January 2007

Let's start the year with an interesting dilemma for Word users. How to add the first word(s) of each page (catchwords) to the footer of the previous page, for which Word does not have an in-built solution?

Thursday 28th, December 2006

Spotted the Paphos pelicans at the harbour, so took the opportunity to add a couple of pictures to the 2006 collection.

Wednesday 27th, December 2006

Based on user feedback, I have added a macro for creating a backup of the current document to removable media, specifically a flash drive, though it could be a floppy drive given sufficient space on that disc for the file. Added a cat picture!

Sunday 24th, December 2006

Took a short break from the festivities to add a further method of adding alternative return addresses etc to envelopes.

Saturday 23rd, December 2006

Christmas is upon us and one of 'our' cats, missing since May, has made a return appearance.

Wednesday 6th, December 2006

Further modifications to the macro set the printer and trays for envelopes and labels.

Monday 4th, December 2006

Based on user feedback from someone who was having particular problems with wildcard searches for reserved characters, I have revised the relevant section of the wildcards tutorial to make the information it contains clearer ... I hope.

Sunday 3rd, December 2006

Time to reorganize some of the photograph galleries. In particular I have created a new page for the growing numbers of cat pictures, and moved the cat pictures to this new page.

Friday 1st, December 2004

Returning yesterday from a business trip to the capital Nicosia, we took the scenic route via Troodos and stopped off near the summit of Mount Olympus, where the light was fantastic for a few photographs.

Wednesday 27th, November 2006

Prompted by a question in the Word Usenet forums, I have added a method of using an alternative printer with the envelope/label wizard to the 'Print to a Specific Printer' page.

Tuesday 26th, November 2006

My near neighbour Geoff Dutch has just launched a web site featuring the restaurants in our home town, which should prove useful, given that there are hundreds of them. I have added a link to my favourites page, should you be holidaying near here and are stuck for a dining-out idea.

Tuesday 15th, November 2006

A few more photographs have been added, plus a couple of broken link repairs. I just didn't get round to updating this list of updates.

Tuesday 31st, October 2006

The storms still rage, but I found time between power outages to update the extract images from a document web page, as some users had problems locating the extracted files. New example illustrations should resolve this issue.

Wednesday 25th, October 2006

Following user requests, I have added a method of constraining the size of graphics merged into labels to the web page on that topic. The method can easily be adapted to any graphic merge where fixed image sizes are required.

Thursday 19th, October 2006

First pictures of the latest kittens

Friday 13th, October 2006

The major storm which had been rumbling away since yesterday evening arrived this morning with a vengeance, dumping two inches of rain in an hour, accompanied by impressive thunder and lightening.  Between them they took out the electricity supply for the district, killed my ADSL link (so it's anyone's guess when I will be able to upload this), and flooded my boiler room. The kittens were not too impressed either.

The photos I added today don't do justice to the weather.

I have also included my house sale page in the main site menu, to make it easier for potential purchasers to find. I am not desperate to sell the house. It is appreciating in value by just standing empty and the annual bills are small, but if anyone wants a nice holiday home in a pleasant part of Cyprus, you now know where to find it .

Monday 2nd, October 2006

Added a new page which demonstrates a method of removing the password from a Word document protected for forms.

Thursday 27th, September 2006

Removed the individual page counter from the Word Pages index. Changed the e-mail message warning on the Home Page. Added a note to the Individual Merge Letters page.

Tuesday 26th, September 2006

Added a method of enhancing the cardtext switch to format cash amounts in words to the formatting Word fields page.

Sunday 24th, September 2006

Users have complained that they are only able to print one page of labels during a merge to mailing labels. The reason is a failure to follow the merge wizard to the end. Further details have been added to the mail merge to labels page.

Sunday 3rd, September 2006

When I moved here to Cyprus, broadband was not available in the village, but after months of struggling with dial-up, I now have an ADSL connection once again. It does not necessarily mean that I will update the site any more frequently, but when I do, it is much quicker to upload the changes. Today's change is a minor change to a graphic on the individual merge letters page, to illustrate the use of Acrobat 7.

Saturday 2nd, September 2006

The counter on my home page bears little relationship to the traffic on the web site, so I thought I would add one to the Word Pages index.

Monday 28th, August 2006

Restored a missing graphic to the mail merge graphics page.

Saturday 5th, August 2006

Back from holiday in Ireland and the UK, I have added a few photos to the Ireland and Wales galleries. See also the amazing amount of growth that has occurred in my garden during the three weeks I have been away!

Sunday 9th, July 2006

Please note that I will unavailable to respond to e-mails sent via this web site from the 11th July to the 1st August 2006 inclusive.

Tuesday 4th, July 2006

Added a further example of conditionally inserting graphics to the formatting word fields page.

Monday 3rd, July 2006

While not strictly anything to do with the Macrobutton field, I have added code to the tutorial to collect addressee information from a typed letter head and create an Outlook Contacts entry from it, as it fits in with the code examples to recover addresses from Outlook.

Wednesday 28th, June 2006

Added extra code to display the print dialog box when printing to an alternative printer.

Friday 23rd, June 2006

Following recent newsgroup questions concerning the removal of the 'Attach as Adobe PDF Toolbar' in Word when used as Outlook Editor (or in Outlook for that matter), I have added instructions for its removal on the 'Lose that Adobe Acrobat Toolbar' page.

Monday 19th, June 2006

The link to the Simple CD Text Player on my downloads page appears to have lost its source, so I have added the missing file to my own site.

Sunday 18th, June 2006

My page  fax_from_word.htm is more about using Word with multiple printers than with Fax in particular, but following feedback from a newsgroup item, it seemed remiss that the page doesn't mention how to obtain the fax function in Windows. That has now been rectified. Checking out my home page, my photo (around four years old) was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I have updated it to the present - so that's me aged 59..

Monday 9th, June 2006

Added macro code to the Macrobutton page to demonstrate the insertion of assorted formatted data from Outlook contacts to produce a typical letterhead for personal or business letters.

Sunday 4th, June 2006

A couple more photos to add to the collection - street market stalls in Kato Paphos.

Saturday 3rd, June 2006

I'm a sucker for cats so, for those who share my enthusiasm, a few more pictures of the latest arrivals.

Thursday 1st, June 2006

Some housekeeping involving minor detail changes to a number of pages - nothing that needs to be highlighted except for a note on the page about Word being unable to import PDF files to include the fact that Word can (in conjunction with Acrobat 7 Reader) import single page PDF files as objects.

Wednesday 31st, May 2006

A new page to help recover those edited e-mailed Word documents that you unwisely opened directly from the e-mail then saved changes.

Monday 29th, May 2006

Following from yesterday's update to the boiler.zip instructions document, I took another look at the add-in itself and added a function to allow the user to choose from which folder the documents are to be selected, which necessitated further amendments to the instructions - which are additionally available in PDF format.

Sunday 28th, May 2006

Updated the installation instructions relating to the boiler.zip download.

Tuesday 23rd, May 2006

In response to user feedback I have added further notes to the web page concerning the control of the Acrobat 7 COM add-in.

Sunday 21st, May 2006

Maybe a little overdue but I have created a 2006 photo gallery and moved the recent images to it. Recent links on this page have been changed to locate the new gallery.

Saturday 20th, May 2006

More photos for the 2005/6 Gallery, taken by my daughter on her current visit to the island.

Friday 19th, May 2006

Further detail added to the formatting of US Zip codes from Excel merge data in the formatting fields web page. I now have my replacement camera, so a couple of extra photographs have been added to the 2005/6 Gallery.

Tuesday 16th, May 2006

Formatting fields information updated to demonstrate a workaround for the problem of empty INCLUDEPICTURE fields displaying the wrong images.

Monday 15th, May 2006

Changes to the macro code for the insertion of Outlook data to demonstrate the insertion of a title field and initial.

Orthodox Easter Sunday 23rd, April 2006

We have friends over from the UK .... with a digital camera, so a few more pictures for the gallery.

Friday 14th, April 2006

Despite damage to my camera, I managed to snatch a couple of snaps of the first of the new kittens. It will be another month before I can get my replacement camera (the brand new Canon Digital Ixus 65) brought over from the UK.

Monday 10th, April 2006

Yet another example added to the formatting fields web page shows how to distinguish between numbers or dates and text in a field.

Tuesday 4th, April 2006

Small correction made to the Search & Replace with Wildcards page

Saturday 1st, April 2006

A further example added to the formatting fields web page.

Friday 10th, March 2006

The old Word 2000 images replaced with up to date versions and some minor alterations to the text of the alternative return addresses web page.

Thursday 9th, March 2006

Added an alternative version of the saved numbered version macro which stores the version numbers in a text file rather than in the registry.

Monday 6th, March 2006

Green Monday a public holiday here in Cyprus and an opportunity to add a few more photos.

Wednesday 1st, March 2006

I thought it would be a good idea to include the full range of field switches, for reference, to the formatting fields web page for the sake of completeness. This is largely the information that is included in Word Help. The downloadable versions have been amended to show the additional data.

Sunday 26th, February 2006

A cloud of microscopic dust from the Sahara blanketing the island has made going outside unpleasant for the last couple of days, so I used the opportunity to update the installing macros web page with a few more illustrations..

Monday 20th, February 2006

Added a couple of photos.

Sunday 19th, February 2006

Encouraged by my American pal and fellow Word MVP Greg Maxey, I have extensively re-worked the automatic numbering of documents macro and have provided the code in a template which can be modified to produce an invoice/order template.

Tuesday 14th, February 2006

User feedback indicated that the merge from Outlook tutorial fell a little short when it came to merging to labels. I have therefore added a further section to describe the additional steps needed to merge to labels.

Sunday 5th, February 2006

A new page added to demonstrate automatic numbering of documents, for use in numbering invoices etc.

Updated the sample macro document to include the macro from the above page.

Saturday 4th, February 2006

Added the latest version of the merge to separate documents add-in to ensure that merged graphics are correctly updated.

Revised the macro for the Clear Recently Used File List page to verify whether the help assistant is available and to temporarily add-it if not.

Added registry patches to the AmiPro and WordStar filters.

Monday 30th, January 2006

The What to Do When Word Crashes page has been extensively revised and brought up to date with new illustrations.

Friday 27th, January 2006

Added the old Word 6/95 text converter, required by some third party software e.g. Quark.

Monday 23rd, January 2006

Updated the label PDF files and their associated zip files to reflect changes that have been made to the web pages they relate to. Added a PDF version for view or download of the special formatting Word fields web page for ease of reference.

Sunday 22nd, January 2006

The macro to save separate numbered and dated versions of a document has been updated to store the numbers in the registry to avoid problems where users do not have write access to the root of the C: drive.

Saturday 21st, January 2006

Added another section to the special formats for Word fields page to demonstrate the use of a switch with a calculated form field to suppress output when the result is zero. I have also removed the photo gallery related to my new house. No point in giving the light fingered a target to think about.

Friday 20th, January 2006

A further update to the merge to separate documents add-in to provide better compatibility with Word XP. This version should also be used if you use Word on a network and do not have write access to the root of the C: drive.

Tuesday 17th, January 2006

Added error handling to catch the clicking of the cancel button in the numbered version macro posted Sunday 15th. January.

Sunday 15th, January 2006

Added a new page with a macro to enable any document to be saved in separate numbered and dated versions

Monday 9th, January 2006

I have discovered that since my move to Cyprus (8 months ago!), PayPal does not offer the facility to accept contributions from users in this country - which shows how few of the tens of thousands of people who accessed the site felt the information provided was worth a contribution to its upkeep. The facility is therefore suspended until PayPal pulls its finger out.

Sunday 8th, January 2006

Further revisions to the merge to separate documents feature, and a new version of the add-in posted for download that combines the option to create separate documents with the option to create PDF files.

Thursday 5th, January 2006

More revisions to the merge to separate documents feature.

Tuesday 3rd, January 2006

More code from Doug Robbins to enable his merge to separate documents add-in to produce separate PDF files in conjunction with Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat Reader).

Monday 2nd, January 2006

Let's start the New Year with an additional tip on how to conditionally insert StyleRef fields into Word documents.

Monday 26th, December 2005

Escaped from the clearing up after the festivities to add conditional merge information to the special formatting page and a few photos to the 2005 gallery.

Tuesday 20th, December 2005

Probably not the last word on the subject, but Doug has revised the split merge code to accommodate a few of my suggestions, and I have documented the use of the add-in on my Individual Merge Letters page.

Monday 19th, December 2005

Doug Robbins has made some improvements to his split merge to separate documents add-in. Revision 7 is now available for download.

Saturday 17th, December 2005

Revisited and updated the envelope templates.

Tuesday 13th, December 2005

Lucky for some, the 13th of the month has always been good to me, so today I have added fellow MVP Doug Robbin's latest macro code to automatically split mail merge letters into separate documents - as an add-in download.

Friday 9th, December 2005

Very minor corrections to the graphics on labels page and updated the site's search engine database.

Add a link to the favourites page to the Simple Sudoku game.

Sunday 3rd, December 2005

Yet another example of the use of formatting switches

Thursday 24th, November 2005

Fixed another incorrectly displayed image on the field formatting page, and included another example of the use of formatting switches.

Monday 21st, November 2005

User feedback pointed out a mathematical anomaly in one of the calculated fields on the formatting word fields page. A workaround to correct this error has been added.

Sunday 20th, November 2005

Some minor cosmetic improvements to the Wildcard tutorial.

Monday 7th, November 2005

Repaired problem that was causing the wrong images to display for the item posted on Friday last.

Sunday 6th, November 2005

Some minor modifications to the macro code on the individual merge letters page to ensure consistency in file naming, following user comment.

Friday 4th, November 2005

Added a further example to the formatting of fields with a calculation to test for a particular result in one or more mail merge fields.

Monday 31st, October 2005

Some people, have reported that the IncludePicture field used in the mail merge graphics tutorial does not work for them. A link has been added to the page which covers this issue when certain named Word versions are used.

Sunday 30th, October 2005

Tonya Marshall, whose Word Perfect label converter macros were hosted by this site now has her own web site, so I have changed the links on the downloads page to point to the original files.

Sunday 23rd, October 2005

Added the MSDOS Text with layout filter for Word to the downloads page.

Friday 21st, October 2005

The kittens were not taken by the fox after all

Sunday 9th, October 2005

Another month gone already, with only a couple more cat photos to add to the pile.

Sunday 11th, September 2005

I am unashamedly a cat person, so presented with a batch of feral kittens, I have added a few pictures to the Cyprus 2005 Gallery.

Tuesday 23rd, August 2005

User feedback suggests that, for some users at least, the SEQ field method of numbering labels (added 17 July 2004) doesn't work properly, so I have replaced it with an alternative method suggested by my friend and fellow Word MVP Greg Maxey.

Wednesday 3rd, August 2005

Further additions to the Wildcard replacement tutorial

Wednesday 6th, July 2005

Additional information included in the Date Calculation page.

Saturday 2nd, July 2005

Following a shoulder injury, I have not been able to do much with the web site during June, but now on the mend, I have added couple of extra photographs added to the New Home gallery, and some further macro code to the Individual Merge Letters page, to suggest a method of naming the individual files from the data source.

Friday 27th, May 2005

Small addition to the discussion of the use of field switches to correct an anomaly where the \*FirstCap switch doesn't work.

Wednesday 18th, May 2005

We have now left England behind. Time to add a few more photos, of the removals, to the New Home gallery, before our furniture arrives.

Thursday 28th, April 2005

Added the Word DXF import filter to the downloads page.

Friday 22nd, April 2005

Add a new photo gallery following a visit to my daughter's home in Ireland.

Sunday 10th, April 2005

Added code to the Insert Address from Outlook macro in the macrobutton tutorial to add the US postal barcode if required.

Added an envelope which employs the above code to the downloadable envelope templates package.

Monday 4th, April 2005

As should be obvious from visiting this site, my wife and I are moving to Cyprus next month. There we will be selling our current house. This page is not linked into the web site menu structure, but if you are interested, you can access the advertisement from here.

Saturday 19th, March 2005

An additional macro example added to the macrobutton tutorial allows the insertion of an alternative telephone number from Outlook when the requested record does not have a telephone number in the chosen field. This example was prompted by a question in the Microsoft Word newsgroups.

Thursday 17th, March 2005

Reference to Acrobat 7 added to the Lose That Toolbar page.

Wednesday 16th, March 2005

The material on this site is provided without obligation (for personal use) , but in response to requests from some visitors who have wished to show their appreciation for their use of it, I have added links to enable visitors, who wish to do so, to make donations to the upkeep of the site.

Sunday 13th, March 2005

Lucky for some - the 13th brings a fix for the bug in the text to speech macro code, that prevented the stop speaking section of the macro from working - thanks to web site visitor Antoine Puerto for pointing out the omission.

Sunday 27th, February 2005

Revised and updated the mail merge label and data PDF downloadable files to match the live files on the site.

Friday 4th, February 2005

Not the nicest of days here in Cyprus, but it provides an excuse to start a new photo gallery for 2005 with some winter images of Paphos harbour.

Saturday 22nd, January 2005

Revisions and additional information to the copy vinyl to CDR tips page.

Friday 21st, January 2005

Word has no import filters for Adobe PDF format files, but there are occasions when it would be desirable to include the content of a PDF in uneditable form in a Word document. This page describes a method that can work around the problem to achieve the same end result.

Wednesday 19th, January 2005

A new web page to demonstrate how to provide text to speech within Word.

Monday 17th, January 2005

I've come across a handy application which deserves a web link on my Favourites page, which extends the concept of autocorrect to all applications. Invaluable for newsgroup junkies and anyone who uses boilerplate text.

Thursday 6th, January 2005

Most of the shutters are now fitted and the builders' clutter has been swept away, but no work today as it's a public holiday (Epiphany).

Wednesday 5th, January 2005

Now back in Cyprus I can see for myself that the house is complete apart from the air conditioning, central heating and the pool. The shutters are being fitted today so more pics. later in the week.

Monday 20th, December 2004

Further warnings added to the use of the destructive cursor when deleting Word menu entries.

Thursday 16th, December 2004

The developer must be working overtime - two more photographs.

Monday 6th, December 2004

The developer surprised me with another batch of house build photos. The work is now almost finished.

Additional information applied to the Outlook merge web page.

Monday 22nd, November 2004

Thanks to one of my new neighbours, a couple more house build photos have been added.

Wednesday 17th, November

Registry patches added to the Word Perfect and Works text filters, as some users have reported that they don't work without them.

Wednesday 10th, November 2004

Thanks to the assistance of friends several more photos have been added to the house build gallery.

Monday 8th, November 2004

Added a page with a useful macro that allows complex field constructions to be simply documented in a text file, thanks to regular Word newsgroup contributor Macropod.

Wednesday 20th, October 2004

Importing PCX images into Word 2003 creates a few problems, but the filter and its installation instructions have been added to the downloads page.

Sunday 17th, October 2004

Another batch of photographs from the developer provide a few additions for the new house photo record.

Tuesday 12th, October 2004

Macro added to graphics on labels page.

Saturday 9th, October 2004

An additional code example added to the individual merge letter page.

Friday 8th, October 2004

Thanks to Windows XP SP2 update the handy Click Yes utility no longer worked. The file has now been updated.

A further method of controlling the Adobe Toolbar has been added to the relevant page.

Monday 13th, September 2004

Back from my short trip and a few pictures to add to the UK Gallery.

A couple of broken links corrected and the latest photo of the new house added.

Sunday 5th, September 2004

Packing my camera for a trip I found some additional new house photos.

Friday 3rd, September 2004

New page added to demonstrate how to backup or move custom label definitions to another PC.

Monday 30th, August 2004

The special formats for Word fields page extended to include a means of including quote marks in the text result of a conditional merge field.

Saturday 28th, August 2004

My old pal Greg Maxey has suggested some major changes to the 'Replace with autotext' macro, to overcome a couple of obscure anomalies. The code has been updated on the web page.

Nothing much else to report, though I have made a few detail changes to correct the odd typo and layout issue that do not justify their own entries.

Saturday 7th, August 2004

Additional examples added to the installing macro page.

Thursday 29th, July 2004

Back in the UK and taking advantage of my broadband link to update a few pages and repair a couple of links in response to user feedback. Nothing that requires particular attention to be drawn to it.

Sunday 25th, July 2004

Added the Microsoft Works  and Word Perfect text converters to the downloads page and a couple of extra new house photos.

Some changes to the layout of the downloads page

Thursday 22nd, July 2004

More photographs for the Cyprus collection and of the new house.

Tuesday 20th, July 2004

Minor addendum to the wildcard search page with reference to list separators.

Also a pair of pictures for the Cyprus collection.

Saturday 17th, July 2004

In response to user feedback, an alternative method of adding numbers to labels has been included in the numbering labels page.

Friday 16th, July 2004

Yet more Cyprus photos and a novelty photo related to the new house..

Thursday 8th, July 2004

Some more Cyprus photos.

Sunday 4th, July 2004

In response to user feedback, a small change has been made to the vba code used to save a document to two locations.

Saturday 3rd, July 2004

Added a page to the Word Tips section explaining how to correct a problem when the Word page header 'disappears'.

Wednesday 30th, June 2004

More photos for the Cyprus 2004 gallery. and the New House gallery

Sunday 27th, June 2004

Added a page to the Word Tips section explaining the use of wildcards in the replace function. This is essentially a revision of a similar article I produced for the MVPS web site a while ago.

Another photo!

Friday 25th, June 2004

More house build photos!

Thursday 24th, June 2004

Some links repaired.

A few minor changes to the layout of the favourites page.

Latest photo of the house build and another snap for the 2004 gallery.

Wednesday 23rd, June 2004

Additional suggestion for the use of a macrobutton field to create a toggled check box in an editable document.

Sunday 20th, June 2004

A few more photos for the new house gallery.

A new page added to demonstrate how to use Word's autotext function to replace indicated text with unusually formatted text.

Thursday 17th, June 2004

Introduced a facility to search this site. Please let me know if you have problems with this.

Sunday 13th, June 2004

Another pair of photos added to the 2004 gallery.

Thursday 10th, June 2004

Back in Cyprus and more photos of the building project.

Monday 7th, June 2004

Following feedback from fellow Word MVP Doug Robbins, I have made a small addition to the start of the formatting fields page.

Friday 4th, June 2004

Added a link to the Belarc Advisor utility. This reporting tool is easily the best that I have seen by a wide margin. It is also free to download.

Two more photographs supplied by the developer show the state of house construction as of yesterday.

Wednesday 19th, May 2004

Minor addition to the formatting fields page concerning the display of percentages.

Tuesday 11th, May 2004

One good thing to come from the 1&1 saga is the improved reporting of web stats now offered by the host. The first result of that is that I have noted the difficulty many are experiencing with the pdf files on the downloads page. The most likely reasons are a lack of Acrobat or patience, as PDF files can take a long time to appear in the browser. I have therefore added the same files in a zipped format for ease of download. Acrobat will still be required to view the contents.

Monday 10th, May 2004

Minor amendment to the graphics on labels web page to provide a workaround where the suggested method has proved unreliable.

Sunday 9th, May 2004

Back in business - no thanks to 1&1, who had removed the Front Page extensions from my web site, and replied to my complaints that it didn't work any more by claiming that the fault was due to their new hardware. After much digging in the bowels of my domain configuration, I have fixed it myself. At least their new web site is infinitely better than their old one, but they had better buck up or I will be moving the site elsewhere when my current contract expires

Saturday 8th, May 2004

Still no host server access, but these updates will be posted one day. In this instance two additions to the Favourites Page.

Thursday 6th, May 2004

Never mind the date - that's when I made the changes, but 1 & 1 who currently host my web site have been changing hardware and I have not been able to post them, so it's anyone's guess when this will appear. What will then be available are three more pictures of the house construction, courtesy of the developer, and a few minor detail changes that I have spotted in the meantime.

Sunday 25th, April 2004

Additional instructions provided for the Printfolders utility.

Friday 23rd, April 2004

A new link added to fellow MVP Stephen Lebans web site for an alternative approach to extracting images from Word.

Minor addition to Formatting Word fields to display nothing when the result is zero or negative.

Thursday 22nd, April 2004

Added page - How to create a fraction in Word when the fraction character is not contained in the font

Changed page title of page Fax from Word to Print to a specific printer and expanded the information it contains to include printing to assorted printers.

Friday 9th, April 2004

Added the plot and house plans to the new house gallery.

Added a set of macros to convert Word Perfect labels to Word format produced by Tonya Marshall.

Wednesday 7th, April 2004

The builder has supplied a photo of the state of the current state of the house build to join the new house gallery

Saturday 3rd, April 2004

A change of link on the Favourites page to an alternative supplier of tools to crack Word (and other Office) passwords.

Tuesday 30th, March 2004

Further modifications to the form field validation macros

Sunday 28th, March 2004

Graphics on labels web page completely re-written.

Friday 26th, March 2004

New page explains how to insert a document based on the content of a drop-down form field.

Thursday 25th, March 2004

More macro code from Peter Hewett, this time in cooperation with fellow MVP Doug Robbins, to replace text across a batch of Word documents.

Wednesday 24th, March 2004

Peter Hewett's code in the uncompleted form field macro has been found not to work in all circumstances. After much testing he has revised the code and the page has been updated to incorporate the revisions.

Saturday 20th, March 2004

Changes to special word formats to allow for regional variations in the way cash amounts are handled.

Envelope templates modified to provide both airmail and standard versions.

Saturday 13th, March 2004

Added page Check for uncompleted form field.

Monday 8th, March 2004

Another update to the new house photo log.

Wednesday 3rd, March 2004

Timber erected and concrete poured into the ground floor seismic columns at the new house site.

Sunday 29th, February 2004

The work goes on at the new house site.

Friday 27th, February 2004

Added a few photographs of Larnaca to the 2004 gallery

Tuesday 24th, February 2004

Security warning added to Accessing Microsoft Newsgroups with Outlook Express

Saturday 21st, February 2004

More new house photos, and some photographs of the carnival added to the 2004 gallery

Saturday 14th, February 2004

Work has begun on the new house.

Monday 2nd, February 2004

Eight new additions to the Cyprus 2004 photo gallery.

Saturday 31st, January 2004

Added cross reference from the Special formats for Word fields page to link to the Mail merge to labels with Office XP page as these pages are intended to be read together.

Friday 30th, January 2004

New page 'How to remove multiple mailmerge entries from the Word tools menu'

Monday 26th, January 2004

Revised the Template Locations page. Four images added to the Cyprus 2004 photo gallery.

Friday 23rd, January 2004

Started the Cyprus 2004 photo gallery, with a selection of photographs showing today's storm.

Wednesday 14th, January 2004

Spam warning added to Accessing Microsoft Newsgroups with Outlook Express

Tuesday 13th, January 2004

Following suggestions that the amendment made on Sunday did not work as expected, I have removed the relevant section.

Sunday 11th, January 2004

A minor amendment made to the Mail merge to labels with Office XP page to cover a third suggestion for correcting display errors with Excel data

Saturday 10th, January 2004

Another snap from my collection to add to the Cyprus 2003 gallery

Thursday 11th, December 2003

Feedback from the site has pointed out that my name is not mentioned anywhere. I've now rectified that and  identified myself on the Home Page. I have also added a minor footnote to the Rotate Text tutorial.

Monday 8th, December 2003

36,000 hits for the year which I don't think is too bad, but the site has now been relocated to my own www.gmayor.com domain, hosted by 1&1, so apologies for any disruption in service.

Saturday 6th, December 2003

Back in the UK for Christmas, perhaps for the last time, as my wife and I have decided to sell our UK base and move permanently to Cyprus later next year. To this end we are having a house built, and I have started a photo gallery to record progress.

Friday 5th, December 2003

Two more images added to the Cyprus 2003 Gallery.

New page explains how to access Microsoft's news server using Outlook Express - for newsgroup beginners.

New link to Mailwasher on the Favourites page.

Extensive changes to improve the appearance of illustrative graphics throughout the web site.

Sunday, 23rd November 2003

Use of the destructive cursor explained in relation to the removal of unwanted menu entries on the Clear Recently Used File List page.

Saturday, 22nd November 2003

New page added - Where are my fonts?

Thursday, 20th November 2003

Four more images added to the Cyprus 2003 Gallery.

Saturday, 15th November 2003

ZapAdobe template compressed to ZIP format for ease of downloading.

Wednesday, 5th November 2003

Additions to 'What to do when Word crashes'

A simpler solution added to the problem of negative numbers in calculations

Wednesday, 29th October 2003

Detail changes, including the removal of duplicate menu structures, to improve loading speeds.

Sunday, 26th October 2003

Airmail envelope template added to Downloads page

Saturday, 18th October 2003

Automatically backup Word documents page added.

Thursday, 9th October 2003

Two new images for the Cyprus 2003 Gallery.

Tuesday, 30th September 2003

Graphics updated to improve presentation and further improve load times - throughout the site.

Monday, 29th September 2003

New page - Negative numbers in calculations added to Word tips..

Sunday, 28th September 2003

Two more images added to the Cyprus 2003 Gallery.

Friday, 19th September 2003

Several minor corrections throughout the site.

Changes to the layout of the Downloads page.

Thursday, 18th September 2003

Mailmerge to labels with Office XP - pdf file (692kb) added to download for ease of printing.

Wednesday, 17th September 2003

Convert label document to mailmerge data file pdf file (153kb)added to download - for ease of printing.

Tuesday, 16th September 2003

Convert labels into  merge data source page edited Graphics updated to Word 2002 formats to reduce file sizes and improve load times by approximately 25%.

Sunday, 14th September 2003

Corrected several broken links introduced during this weekend's edits - please let me know if you find any more.

Downloads page sorted into alphabetical order.

Favourites split into sections by type.

Saturday, 13th September 2003

Three photographs of Curium added to the Cyprus 2003 Gallery

Favourites  and Word Tips titles sorted into alphabetical order

Tuesday, 9th September 2003

Downloadable files moved from Favourites to new Downloadable Files page

Thursday, 4th September 2003

Revisions to macro code in the Lose the Adobe toolbar tutorial and updated version of the template.

Wednesday, 3rd September 2003

Lose the Adobe toolbar tutorial and global template added

Sunday, 31st August 2003

Updated the graphics on Copy Vinyl or Tape Recordings to CDR  to Windows XP formats.

Saturday, 30th August 2003

This page was added.

Minor changes to the text of the Home Page.  Hardly worth going to check