Macros for MS Word
Below are descriptions of three really cool macros I wrote to be used
with MS Word. These macros can be downloaded at the end of this
page.
Contents
Email Utilities
This set of macros is really useful when you use MS Word in conjunction
with your email software in order to prepare outgoing email or print incoming
messages. (Note if you don’t have a Windows email program that you can
copy and paste to, then these macros probably won’t be of much use to you.)
Clean Email
Do you ever get a really useful email that you want to print out, but
the problem is that its ten pages long because the lines are so short and
you really don’t want to use all that paper? Well then this macro is for
you. If you copy and paste an email message into MS Word and then run this macro, it will remove the carriage returns at the end of each line so that the text can wrap to the full width of the paper. Running this macro will improve the appearance of the message and GREATLY reduce the amount of paper you need to print, especially if you also use a small proportional font (such as 10 pt Times Roman), narrow margins, etc. The macro preserves the ‘paragraphs’ in the original message (i.e. blocks of text separated with a blank line) and can also take out all those annoying ">" characters if you’d like. You can clean up either the entire message or, by selecting text before you run the macro, just a portion of the message.
The Clean Email macro is also a ‘must’ if you ever copy and paste text
from a web browser. That’s because web browsers like Netscape or Explorer
put carriage returns at the end of each line when you copy text to the
clipboard. That’s fine for the browser, but looks crappy and wastes paper
in MS Word.
Prep Text for Email
Do you ever prepare a document or letter in MS Word, and then copy
and paste it into your email program? Well this macro is for you; it will
help you ‘prep’ your document before you copy and paste it into your email
program.
You might be asking, "Why do I need to ‘prep’ my document before
I paste it into my email software? Why can’t I just copy and paste it just
the way it is?" Well, the answer is of course you can. But this macro
will do a few things that will really help improve the appearance of your
message on the other side:
- You can specify the maximum number of characters that go on each line,
and the macro will place carriage returns at the end of each line so the
receiver will get your message with exactly the same line breaks. (When
you paste into your email software without ‘prepping’, the text will of
course wrap but my experience has been that line breaks frequently get
altered on the receiver end. That’s why we sometimes receive an email message
with only one or two words on some lines).
- The macro will automatically convert bulleted text into asterisks
- You can put a few blank spaces at the beginning of each line to simulate
a left indent
- You can prep all or just a the highlighted portion of your document
Prep Table for Email
Note: this macro is only available for Word 97.
One of the most challenging aspects about pasting text into email programs is how to preserve tabular formatting. This macro will take a table in Word, and convert it into plain text, such that when the plain text is displayed or printed in a mono-pitch font (such as Courier), the tabular formatting will be preserved. This is truly a great tool for emailing information that looks best in a table, such as accounting figures, resumes, sidebar comments, etc.
For example, before running the macro, your table might look like this:
| Department | Activities |
| Sales | Presented new product line to board |
| Personnel | Advertised new warehouse positions in local newspapers.
Attended a job fair at state college that required designing a new recruitment brochure
Sent salary raise proposal to budgeting |
After running the 'Prep Table for Email' macro, your table will look like this:
-----------------------|---------------------------------------------
Department |Activities
-----------------------|---------------------------------------------
Sales |Presented new product line to board
-----------------------|---------------------------------------------
Personnel |Advertised new warehouse positions in local
|newspapers.
|Attended a job fair at state college that
|required designing a new recruitment
|brochure
|Sent salary raise proposal to budgeting
-----------------------|---------------------------------------------
Email Survey Processor
More and more surveys are being sent out via email. Email is a convenient
way to reach a large number of people without a lot of effort. However
like any survey data, typing in the responses into the computer is burdensome.
It seems especially inane to print out an email message just to retype
in the responses into a spreadsheet or stats package. This macro will automatically
extract the data from responses of an email surveys. It saves this data
in a tab-separated text file that you can easily import into any spreadsheet,
stats package, database, or word processor.
This macro can be used with any type of survey. The only design requirement
is tht when you prepare your email survey, add [ ] brackets wherever you
want the user to fill in a response. Further instructions and tips for
conducting an email survey are included with the macro instructions.
If this survey processor macro isn't powerful enough for you, I've heard of a commercial software package which does the same thing called Decisive Survey. See http://www.messagemedia.com.
LUIS Citation Wizard
Do you ever use the email capability of LUIS (the University of Florida online library catalog) to email literature citations
to yourself and then try to print them out? If you do, then this macro
is for you! With the LUIS Citation Wizard, you can ‘clean up’ the appearance
of these citations. Specifically, you can delete all those fields you don’t
really need (like the ISSN number), and take out the carriage returns from
the end of each line so that when you print it the text will wrap to the
full width of the paper (saving paper and improving appearance). The macro
will also underline and indent the field names for easier reading.
If you want to make your library research into a science, then you can
also use the LUIS Citation Wizard to export the fields from your citations
into a tab-separated ASCII text file, which you can then import into a
database program like MS Access or a spreadsheet. When you realize that
many citations come with complete abstracts, the possibilities of this
‘power’ are exciting. With ‘just a few clicks,’ you can create your own
database full of the abstracts of all the articles of your favorite journal
for the last 5 years. If you know anything about databases, you can then
print them out in nice looking reports, set up key word searches, etc.
All from the comfort of your own chair.
The LUIS Citation Wizard is easy to run. Just import (copy and paste)
the email message(s) into a new word document and run the macro. You should
also know in advance which LUIS database the citations came from (e.g.
the UF Catalog, ABI/Inform, Current Contents, etc.). The wizard will walk
you through the steps of selecting the fields to keep or delete, and whether
you want to just clean up the citations for printing or export them as
an ASCII file.
NOTE: LUIS continues to change the formatting of their emailed citations (for example recently they added the call number), so you might want to double-check that the macro will still work as expected.
Downloading
The macros are saved in MS Word template files. Simply download the file you want, then open the template in MS Word and read the instructions. The installation procedure will either add the macro to a toolbar or put them on your 'Tools' menu so they’ll always be handy.
- Email Utilities
- LUIS Citation Wizard
- Email Survey Processor
How to Join the Updates List
If you’d like to receive email updates when bugs are found in these macros or new features added, then fill in the form below.