Word Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Your Text

I learn through practical examples. I hate those many many programming books out there that just give you the dry bones of how the functions, parameters, arrays, variables, data types, objects, and so on work together. Even if I might actually understand what they're saying, they still leave me scratching my head and saying: "Ok, I got it. Now why would anyone ever want to do that?" This book is NOT like that at all. This is an adventure in programmatic praxiology. It is very well written and very well presented. I learned a ton of ways to actually use VBA with Word.

This is the book you need if you want to get under the hood of Word. Solves lots of problems, useful code examples, and the right attitude to Word (love it, hate it, we have to use it and may as well tame it). I hope there's a second volume someday. Buy this along with Word Annoyances and you'll be all set to do deep stuff with Word, right up to the VBA/serious macros borderline.

It seems like the Hacks series just keeps getting better and better. This time I had a chance to review the book Word Hacks by Andrew Savikas (O'Reilly). As usual, there are a number of items here that I'll be able to use right away... Chapter list: Word Under the Hood; The Word Workspace; Formatting, Printing, and Table Hacks; Editing Power Tools; Templates and Outlines; Housekeeping; Macro Hacks; Forms and Fields; Advanced Word Hacks; Word 2003 XML Hacks; Index For those unfamiliar with the Hacks format... It consists of 100 tips, tricks, or unique ways of doing things with the subject at hand (like Word, Excel, etc.). The hacks are normally not things that you would find intuitively obvious, or even things that you thought were just flat-out impossible to do. In Word Hacks, the author (along with a number of contributors) takes you on a trip into the inner world of Word and uncovers a multitude of tricks you've probably never seen... Wonder how to get IE to launch Word documents in Word? That's hack # 8. Need dummy text to fill out content in a document but you don't want to just type random characters? Check out #14. How about using Word as a Windows backup utility? Yes, you can do that, and hack #81 shows you how. The thing I like most about this book is the profusion of VBA code to be found. For non-programmers, this might be a hindrance in that a lot of the hacks involve using the VBA code they supply. I can think of a number of potential readers who would be totally lost there. But for developers who use COM to manipulate Word from other software packages, this is a treasure trove of ideas. An excellent "R & D" resource... "Rob & Duplicate"! :-) If you're an average user of Word or a power user who doesn't want to play with code, you'll get some value here. If you're a techno-geek who wants to program everything, this is your book. Highly recommended...

A better subtitle for this is "Tips for Taming It with Macros." The book begins with showing how to tweak the interface to meet your needs, one of the few hacks not requiring macros. For a long time, I never modified the interface beyond choosing the tool bars I wanted to view. I frequently used the word count feature and added that to the interface. Since then, I've learned to modify it based on my needs so I can quickly access the most often used features. Tip #1 is all about that. Haven't ventured into macros, or at least not much? Get a crash course on how to create and run macros so you can use those included in the book and venture on your own. Savikas explains the basics at the 30-foot level while guiding the reader through the steps of creating and running a simple macro. Many of the hacks use macros. When clicking on a link to a .doc file from within a Web site, the file opens within the browser and editing it is difficult because many of Word's tool bars are not there for your use. Hack #8 puts an end to this nuisance. In "Building a Better MRU" (most recently used), take the MRU file feature up a notch and pump it up with a form. According to the book, most of the hacks work with Word 2000, 2002 (also known as Word XP), and 2003. It mentions some of the hacks work with the old Word 97, but the book focuses on 2000, 2002, and 2003. The last chapter, "Word 2003 XML Hacks," begins on page 319 and is the only one specific to the newest version of Word. The book follows the Hack series model making it easy to use as a reference. All the tips offered are listed in the table of contents. If you like what you find there and want something heavily focused on macros, the book will satisfy your needs. Those looking for a manual with help for getting around Word and discovering some of its power are better off with a different book. Anyone who is comfy with Word and likes to fiddle with something a little more advanced will get just that. Try a couple of hacks at a time to build up your Word knowledge. Soon you'll be creating your own macros. Those who are macro pros might not glean much from the book. The book's publisher's Web site includes five sample hacks . Try them out to get a feel for what the book offers. The same page has a link for downloading code examples from the book.

There is a huge global base of Microsoft Word users; some subset of which should find this book useful. Savikas goes beyond common texts that either get you quickly started on MS Word, or comprehensively tell you of every option. You are presumed to be already facile. So much so that you've run into recurrent annoyances, which perhsps the book can help alleviate. The hacks deal mostly with problems for which macro programming is needed. It's not about situations where the answer is some obscure manual sequence of steps you must do within MS Word. Nor are the large reference books on MS Word likely to be of help. They do explain macro programming, and give examples. But that consists only of a fraction of their coverage. Whereas, you have here a book focused on macros. You don't necessarily have to already be programming macros to get something out of this book; though it would help. If a given hack addresses your situation, you can just copy vebatim the hack's solution code into a macro.