microsoft.public.word.vba.general

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the feedback.

You wrote:
"But the point of my question -- I should have been more explicit the
first time -- is that

Selection.Delete Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1

does exactly the same thing as

Selection.Delete

regardless of the number of characters in the selection. Now that you
know how to limit the deletion to occur only when the jump mark is
found, you don't need the Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1 part any more (if
in fact you ever did need it)."

No Jay, I had not realized that point at all. Thanks for pointing it out
to me.

You also wrote:
"I understand that it doesn't make much (or possibly any) difference to
you, because you know the history. But someday, somebody else may have
to do some maintenance on your system of macros, or maybe they'll be
converting the macros to another language in an external solution like
VSTO, and they may not have an extensive knowledge of VBA. "

Those are very good points. Besides, elegant is always better.

I share my macros with anyone who wants them at work, and some have
tried to hack some of my macros. That's why I comment them so
extensively, and I also put links to this forum and other places I swipe
bits of code from, as well as books and articles I refer to. I really am
a beginner at this and appreciate all the help I can get.

Regards,

Alan Stancliff



Jay Freedman wrote:
> Hi Alan,
>
> Thanks for the explanation. Working around the weird limitations of third-party
> software is always "fun".
>
> But the point of my question -- I should have been more explicit the first time
> -- is that
>
> Selection.Delete Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
>
> does exactly the same thing as
>
> Selection.Delete
>
> regardless of the number of characters in the selection. Now that you know how
> to limit the deletion to occur only when the jump mark is found, you don't need
> the Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1 part any more (if in fact you ever did need it).
>
> I understand that it doesn't make much (or possibly any) difference to you,
> because you know the history. But someday, somebody else may have to do some
> maintenance on your system of macros, or maybe they'll be converting the macros
> to another language in an external solution like VSTO, and they may not have an
> extensive knowledge of VBA. Then that extra verbiage may make them think that
> you intended to delete only one character from the Selection instead of the
> whole Selection, and that could introduce a bug that's easily avoidable by doing
> the right thing now.
>
>
> On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:28:36 -0800, Alan Stancliff
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the information and suggestions to Doug Robbins, Greg Maxey,
>> and Jay Freedman. I have been able to cobble together something workable
>> for me.
>>
>> Jay asks:
>> "By the bye, I don't understand why you have Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
>> in the Delete statement."
>>
>> Jay, this is going to sound a bit weird.
>>
>> I am a medical transcriptionist, and the doctors sometimes have a bit of
>> canned speech to put in, something like boilerplate text or Word's text
>> insert. These are called "normals" in our industry. There will be places
>> in it for us to fill in information. For example, a sentence might be
>> something like "we prepped the patient's ____ side" and we put in left
>> or right. By convention, stemming back years ago when all medical
>> transcriptionists used WordPerfect, a jump code of two question marks
>> was used, like this ??. An insert may have half a dozen or more of these
>> goodies.
>>
>> Yes, I know about bookmarks. WordPerfect had bookmarks too. But we have
>> to work with what our employer gives us.
>>
>> There is a macro attached to a shortcut key that searches for these
>> "jump marks." Recently, our hospital changed transcription software
>> vendors, and the old vendor had a macro that searched for the jump mark,
>> deleted it, and left the cursor where it had been. If there was no jump
>> mark, the cursor did not move.
>>
>> The new vendor's macro simply searches for the jump mark but does not
>> delete it. And if one tries to record a macro that jumps to the jump
>> mark and deletes it, the conundrum is what you would expect. If the
>> search failed, the macro deletes the one character under the cursor. To
>> have a macro that actually does what we need, it must be written instead
>> of recorded because the logic of the task dictates there must be some
>> sort conditional branching...if found, do this, if not, do that.
>>
>> Because of your and the others' kind assistance, I was able to make a
>> macro that performed much more as I wished.
>>
>> I hope this answer was not too long-winded. But you did ask. When I
>> posed the question, I tried to make it more general so the answer would
>> be more generally helpful to others browsing this forum, and it was a
>> good learning experience for me.
>>
>> Thanks again to those who answered my question. This forum is a
>> wonderful resource for those of us just beginning to figure out VBA.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Alan Stancliff
>
> --
> Regards,
> Jay Freedman
> Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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