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Hack 61 Intercept Word Commands

This hack shows you how to change the way Word
works with the ominous-sounding technique of command
interception.

What happens when you
choose Save from the File menu?
Obviously, Word saves the current file. But that's
not the whole story. You've executed the
FileSave command, which tells Word to do the
actual work of writing the file to disk on your computer. Likewise,
when someone dials your phone number, a computer somewhere inside the
phone company directs the call to the phone line in your house. If
you move, you can just ask the phone company to send calls to your
new house instead. You can even temporarily forward your calls just
about anywhere, and the people dialing your number will be none the
wiser.

Word lets you do the same sort of thing with its built-in commands
(such as FileSave). The concept of
intercepting commands has been around for a long
time, but Word has made it very easy to doand, perhaps more
importantly, very easy to undo.

You can intercept only commands executed from the Word interface.

To run the sample macros in this section, place them in the template
of your choice [Hack #50] .
They will run when you execute the commands after which
they're named.

To continue with the telephone analogy, this example shows you how to
forward calls made to FileSave:

Sub FileSave( )
MsgBox "You have executed the FileSave command!"
End Sub

Go ahead, try and save the file. You'll get the
dialog shown in Figure 7-4.

Figure 7-4. A simple example of an intercepted command

In this example, the intercepted command does not save the file, nor
will it unless you include some additional code in your macro. To
actually save the file, change the macro as follows:

Sub FileSave( )
ActiveDocument.Save
MsgBox "You've saved the file."
End Sub

This may seem like a trivial example, but it shows how easily you can
change Word's behavior.

7.6.1 Finding the Command's Name

To intercept a command, you need
to
know its name. For some commands, like Bold,
it's pretty easy. Others, like
MailMergeAskToConvertChevrons,
aren't so straightforward. Fortunately, you can
figure out the exact name of a command in several ways.

If you have a general idea of the command name, or if you just want
to browse the available commands, select
ToolsMacroMacros and choose Word Commands from
the "Macros in" pull-down menu, as
shown in Figure 7-5.

Figure 7-5. A description of each command is also provided (even if it is grayed out)

Select the command you want to intercept, choose the template or
document where you want to create the macro from the
"Macros in" drop-down menu, and
click the Create button to display the Visual Basic equivalent of the
command you selected, as shown in Figure 7-6. You
can then replace the VBA code with your own code.

Figure 7-6. Word launches the Visual Basic Editor and fills in the VBA version of the command you selected

If you can find the command within the Word interface, press Ctrl-Alt
and the "+" key on the number pad.
Your cursor will turn into a cloverleaf (just like the Command symbol
on a Macintosh). If you click any button or menu item, it will bring
up the Customize Keyboard dialog shown in Figure 7-7, which will also tell you the name of the
particular command.

Figure 7-7. This dialog will tell you the name of a command

To get a list of all available commands, choose the
ListCommands macro from the list of Word commands
shown in Figure 7-5 and click the Run button to
create a new document with a table listing each Word command. You can
also find a more useful and detailed list of commands at http://www.word.mvps.org/faqs/general/CommandsList.

7.6.2 Command Precedence

What happens if an intercept
macro
in a document shares the same name as one in the Normal template?
When you execute a command, Word first searches the document for any
macros with the same name as the command, then it searches the
document template, then it searches the installed global templates.
If it finds a macro with the same name as the command, Word runs the
macro instead of the command, and then stops looking.

7.6.3 See Also

[Hack #35]

[Hack #39]

[Hack #42]