robws/word-vba

VBA macros for Microsoft Word (Windows)

word-vba

This repository contains macros written in Word VBA. Mike Pope is the host.

There are two branches: master and word-vba-feature

Versions of Word

I use Word 2013 for Windows, but much of this applies to earlier versions of Word. Most of it probably applies to Word for the Mac, but I cannot guarantee that.

Installing macros

To install macros, you need to be able to open the macro editor in Microsoft Word. In Windows, you can do this by pressing Alt+F11 while you're in a document. If you've configured Word to show the Developer tab, you can also use the Code area of the ribbon to manage macros.

Here's a primer on how to use the VBA editing environment and work with macros:

Getting Started with VBA in Word 2010

List of macros

Here's a brief description of what's in this repo. The .mac extension is just a plain text file (like a .bas module).

Macro	Description
change-plaintext-to-normal.mac	Change plain text to Normal style. This was written in response to a query to on the Word-Pc list. If you open up a pure-text file in Word, Word formats the text in the file as the style named Plain Text. The poster wondered if there was a way to have Word instead show everythign in Normal. There might be a better way to do that, but this macro seems to do the trick. It relies on the fact that Word runs AutoNew, AutoOpen, and AutoClose macros if they exist when (respectively) you create, open, and close a document.
show-hide-revisions.mac	> This macro toggles revision marks. In the language of the Word UI, it's the equivalent of the following: Review (tab) > Tracking > [All Markup|No Markup] More info: http://mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=2407
toggle-smart-quotes.mac	Turns on/off the feature in Word that converts straight quotes to curly quotes. Most useful when this has a keyboard shortcut assigned to it.
make-bold.mac	Adds <b></b> tags around the selected text.
make-code.mac	Adds <code></code> tags around the selected text.

Managing the Styles pane

Macro	Description
set-styles-panel-to-all-alphabetical.mac	Changes the display in the Styles pane to a) show all styles in b) alphabetical order.

HTML-related macros

Macro	Description
convert-all-links.mac	Walks through all Word hyperlinks and converts them to <a> elements (with target="_blank"). An interesting feature of this macro is that it walks backward through the collection of links. The issue is that as each hyperlink is converted, it stops being a hyperlink and is thus removed from the collection. This confuses any code that is walking the collection.
convert-to-ul-list.mac	Converts the selected text to a <ul> list. Each paragraph becomes one list item.
hyperlinks.mac	Contains functions to remove hyperlinks or unlink them (convert them to regular text).