Word Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Why Word Hacks?

Hacking has a bad reputation in the press. They
use the term hackers to refer to people who
break into systems or wreak havoc with computers as their weapons. Among
people who write code, though, the term hack
refers to a
"quick-and-dirty" solution to a
problem, or a clever way to get something done. And the term
hacker is meant very much as a compliment,
referring to someone as being creative, or
having the technical chops to get things done. The Hacks series is an
attempt to reclaim the word, document the good ways people are
hacking, and pass the hacker ethic of creative participation on to
the uninitiated. Seeing how others approach systems and problems is
often the quickest way to learn about a new technology.

Word Hacks is about solving problems. That may
mean automating repetitive tasks, adding sorely needed features,
rearranging menus and toolbars, and even controlling Word from
another program. Word is used by millions of people every day, and
100 hacks can't possibly cover all the problems
those users will face. So this book is also about giving you the
tools and the inspiration to hack solutions for your own unique Word
problems. While you'll find beginning, intermediate,
and advanced hacks between the covers, this book is not an exhaustive
treatment of everything you can do with
Microsoft Word.

You can use most of the hacks in this book even if you know nothing
about VBA. But truly hacking Word means using VBA, and the dozens of
macros in this book, ranging from simple to very complex, may even
help you learn a bit of VBA.

When creating VBA macros for this book, I chose to use readable
rather than more robust code. If you plan to use these macros in a
business or production environment, you should include sufficient
error handling and data validation. In many cases, I also sacrificed
performance for readability. For most Word users, and most Word
documents, the difference is negligible. However, if you work with
long documents, you might find more efficientbut more
complexways to perform many of these hacks. For tips on
improving the performance of your VBA code, see [Hack #64] in Chapter 7.