B
bonehead
Okay, it's been awhile since I've posted this question, but I'm getting
ready to finally migrate my office to new machines, so I'll be going
from Win2K to WinXP, and from Office 2K to either Office XP or Office
2K3. Here's the issue:
I've been trying for years to get the users to migrate from WordPerfect
to Word, with only partial success. Almost nobody else in our large
organization is using WP, but my lovely users have about 15 years of
legacy WP documents and they're pretty much married to it emotionally.
One of the biggest obstacles has been the issue of shared AutoText
macros. In WP, the users have created about 300 (yes, it's true)
AutoText macros which must be available *globally* to *all* users, on
*all* documents, *all* day long. If an AutoText macro is changed or
added, the update must be immediately available to all users on all
documents.
In WP, you can create these macros on the fly, each macro is a separate
file with it's own unique filename, and they are all stored in a
separate directory on a shared server. The users can hit a hotkey
combination to raise the directory showing the names of all the macros,
and they can just type in the name of the macro they want to get the
required AutoText. Note that these are truly global, meaning that if one
user changes one of the macros, that updated version is immediately
available to all users on all documents. This includes source data files
for merges which are also created in WP.
The closest I've been able to come to replicating this in Word (97 or
2000) is to create a .dot file, place it in a shared "STARTUP"
directory, then go around and point each user's Word app to that shared
startup directory in Tools | Options | File Locations. But the users
still don't like it because they can't use a hotkey combination to raise
a window showing the names of all the macros, plus it's a PITA to
maintain because I can't update the .dot unless no one is currently
using it, which means I either have to kick everybody off Word or come
in at 6:30am and hope there isn't a manager already using it.
BTW, we're using a very small portion of a very large file server
running Novell, so it's not likely that I'd be able to use an
application server to get around this, and even if I could, I'm not sure
it would really solve my problem.
I have Office XP and Office 2K3 both installed on my test machine. Is
there a better solution in one of these versions that I'm not seeing?
Comments/suggestions?
ready to finally migrate my office to new machines, so I'll be going
from Win2K to WinXP, and from Office 2K to either Office XP or Office
2K3. Here's the issue:
I've been trying for years to get the users to migrate from WordPerfect
to Word, with only partial success. Almost nobody else in our large
organization is using WP, but my lovely users have about 15 years of
legacy WP documents and they're pretty much married to it emotionally.
One of the biggest obstacles has been the issue of shared AutoText
macros. In WP, the users have created about 300 (yes, it's true)
AutoText macros which must be available *globally* to *all* users, on
*all* documents, *all* day long. If an AutoText macro is changed or
added, the update must be immediately available to all users on all
documents.
In WP, you can create these macros on the fly, each macro is a separate
file with it's own unique filename, and they are all stored in a
separate directory on a shared server. The users can hit a hotkey
combination to raise the directory showing the names of all the macros,
and they can just type in the name of the macro they want to get the
required AutoText. Note that these are truly global, meaning that if one
user changes one of the macros, that updated version is immediately
available to all users on all documents. This includes source data files
for merges which are also created in WP.
The closest I've been able to come to replicating this in Word (97 or
2000) is to create a .dot file, place it in a shared "STARTUP"
directory, then go around and point each user's Word app to that shared
startup directory in Tools | Options | File Locations. But the users
still don't like it because they can't use a hotkey combination to raise
a window showing the names of all the macros, plus it's a PITA to
maintain because I can't update the .dot unless no one is currently
using it, which means I either have to kick everybody off Word or come
in at 6:30am and hope there isn't a manager already using it.
BTW, we're using a very small portion of a very large file server
running Novell, so it's not likely that I'd be able to use an
application server to get around this, and even if I could, I'm not sure
it would really solve my problem.
I have Office XP and Office 2K3 both installed on my test machine. Is
there a better solution in one of these versions that I'm not seeing?
Comments/suggestions?