Win XP sp2, Office 2K3 sp2
(BTW, I don't anticipate migrating to Vista | Office 2K7 until all my
users have had at least a couple of hours of highly structured training.)
Okay, here's the Question of the Day:
My users have been married for years to Corel WordPerfect. They
especially love the Text Macro feature. By pressing a hotkey combination
(i.e. Alt-F10), they can raise a File | Open dialog that allows them to
select from any of hundreds of text insertion macros, each of which
exists as its own separate file, in a directory that is completely
separate from WP's program files, and completely separate from the
document files. For example, by typing "histc" and the Enter key, they
can automatically insert the text:
"Joe Blow, Chair, Department of History"
And, of course, we store these text macros in a shared directory on our
server.
The result is that the exact same versions of all of these text macros
(and there are hundreds of them) are globally available to all users in
all sessions. And, the users don't have to maintain their own versions
individually: any user can edit any of the shared macros on the fly,
regardless of whether any other users currently have a WordPerfect
session open, and the changes are immediately available the next time
any user runs that particular macro.
It's the single most popular function in WordPerfect and the single
biggest reason they still use it.
In Word 2K3, the closest I was able to come to replicating this was to
create a template, AutoText.dot, and store it in a shared directory.
Then, I set each user's Word Startup property, to point to that shared
directory. The result is that the exact same versions of all the
AutoText entries are globally available to all users in all sessions,
and they don't have to maintain them individually.
The only drawback, of course, is that the minute one user starts a
session of Word, the template is locked for editing. So the only way to
maintain it is to make a copy of the template, edit the copy, and then
kick everybody out of Word just long enough to copy the edited version
back over to the original directory. Not pretty, but it works.
But, of course, it doesn't stop there. Because the users also use
WordPerfect to create hundreds of merge letters, each with it's own
individually created data file, which was *also* created in WordPerfect,
and, of course, all those beautiful text macros are also available when
creating those data files.
So now, the users want to know if I can replicate that feature in Excel,
so that they can use Excel to create data files for merges into Word.
And yes, I've tried doing Word merges directly from Corel data files,
and believe me, it's not pretty.
And yes, I've also tried migrating Corel data files into Excel, and
believe me, it's not pretty.
And even if it *was* pretty, it still doesn't solve the problem of
freeing the users from having to use WordPerfect to create the data
files in the first place.
So, the question of the day is, what would be the optimal way to
replicate this feature in Excel?
So far, the best idea I can come up with is to create hundreds of
macros, store them all in a .xlt file, put that .xlt file in a shared
directory, and then set everybody's alternate startup folder to point to
that directory.
Then, I'd have to figure out how to create a menu and set of submenus
for these 300 or so macros, and possibly create hotkey combinations to
raise them. The result would be roughly the same: the same versions of
the same macros would be available to all users in all sessions, and
they wouldn't have to maintain them individually. But I wouldn't be able
to edit and replace the .xlt file without temporarily kicking everybody
out of Excel (and without having to re-explain to everybody, *why* it is
that I have to do it that way, every time I have to do it).
Unless somebody has a better idea...
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