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VBA for Technical Writers: Automate Tasks and Add Interactivity
- 1. VBA for Technical Writers a.k.a what to do when the macro recorder isn’t enough Adrian Morse Documentation Manager at Picis
- 6. The blue monkey DEMO
- 10. Macros start with “Sub” Comments added automatically Actions performed by the user Macro name The VBA Editor: Inside the blue monkey Macros end with “End Sub”
- 11. The bold blue monkey DEMO
- 19. The responsive blue monkey DEMO
- 21. Adding a User Interface: What you can do
- 22. The inquisitive blue monkey DEMO
- 25. The loopy blue monkey DEMO
- 27. The increasingly loopy blue monkey DEMO
- 29. The conditional blue monkey DEMO
Editor's Notes
- introduction to the Visual Basic for Applications functionality that ships with Microsoft Office products. VBA taster session _______________________
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- Cannot handle errors - for example, if a macro changes the border colour of a selected table and we run the macro when no table is selected we’ll get an error message. _______________________
- The primary objective of the demos is to reinforce the concepts needed to start creating and editing macros. So, realism sacrificed for simplicity. All demos are variations of a simple macro called the blue monkey . _______________________
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- Comments are ignored when the code is run. When you start editing and creating macros it is good practice to add comments throughout the code. You do this by starting the line with an apostrophe. Note the value for bolding is “wdToggle”. This relates to the limitation– the macro recorder guesses the user’s intentions. It assumes when I clicked the B button on the toolbar while creating macro my intention was to toggle the state of the button rather than to apply bold to the selected text. So, now if I were to click the B button before running the macro the code would toggle the bold off and the word “monkey” would be in regular font. This is not what I wanted. To overcome this I am going to edit the macro. _______________________
- First I am going to show you the problem… >Side by side, bold turned off, F8 to run macro. Now bold turned on and run macro again. Now I am going to fix this by changing the selection.font.bold setting. >fix and rerun macro _______________________
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- Last bullet point….The hierarchy is known as the Object Model. Each MS Office application has a different object model. _______________________
- You can go a long way without ever needing to create new classes. _______________________
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- This slide shows an example of a method and a property for the object called “Selection”. The Blue Monkey macro code uses this object and in fact the macro recorder often bases its code on this object. Typetext is an action that the object performs. It means it places the text on the page. Color is a property of the selection that can be changed. _______________________
- Some objects have events associated with them. Example…the “Document” object can be opened so it has an event called “open” associated with it. VBA makes it particularly easy to access events for the Document object. It does this using the ThisDocument file. This is one of the standard files that I showed you earlier. If you click in the dropdown at the top right you will see a list of the most common event types for the Document object. So you just need to choose the event that you want to trigger your code and then add the code. _______________________
- There are various ways to get help with creating macros… Note that Methods and properties are collectively referred to as “members” in the Object Browser and help file. _______________________
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- You can add all sorts of controls to a form. It’s easy…you just drag, drop and resize them… _______________________
- So now the blue monkey is going to ask us a question…. >Create userform and add code to Thisdocument. Reopen doc. _______________________
- There are many ways of adding intelligence to a macro. I am going to talk about two of those: looping and applying conditions.
- So we’ve seen that when we record a macro it can set the properties of an object and makes that object do something. Now suppose we want to make that object do something repeatedly. If we had all day to spare we could just record a much longer macro where we repeat tasks over and over again. However, the VB Editor gives us an easy way to repeat a segment of code using a technique called looping . _______________________
- So now we’re going to code the blue monkey to repeat itself… >Open yes button code and add For x = 1 to 10, next x …. >Reopen doc ______________________
- Now let’s suppose we not only want to repeat the code but we also want to make a change each time the code runs. X is already incrementing by 1 with each loop so we’re going to take advantage of that to increment the point size in the code in the loop. When x is 1 we add 2pts. When x is 2 we add 4pts Etc _______________________
- So now I am going to add the code for increasing the font size… >Open yes button code and add change font setting to 24 + 2*x , Reopen the doc…show increasing font size _______________________
- Now suppose we only want a segment code to be run in certain conditions. There are various ways to do this. One is with an IF…THEN…ELSE construction. For this example, we only want to run the blue monkey macro if the document filename is Blue.docm…
- So now I’m going to edit the macro so that the window only pops up if the document has the name blue.docm. >Add the following to the code in the ThisDocument and reopen If ActiveDocument.Name = "Blue.docm" Then … Else: MsgBox (“Rename the document to Blue.docm") End If >Reopen doc. >Close doc and rename to Blue.docm >Reopen doc. _______________________
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- Actually blue monkeys do exist… in Tanzania! _______________________