Miscellaneous Ramblings
Easily Comment/Uncomment Code
View->Toolbars->Edit has two buttons for Comment Block and Uncomment Block. If you want to incorporate these buttons into the main toolbar then View->Toolbars->Customize... Select the Commands tab, scroll to the Edit category (left pane) and find the Comment Block and Uncomment Block buttons in the Commands pane (right one). Click, hold and drag each button to the toolbar of your choice. Then close the dialog box when done.
The Law Office/VBA Story
Back when Office 97 (the first version of Office to have Word using VBA) first came out I was teaching a VB 4 course in Houston. One of our modules was on Automation - we had to make Word and Excel do tricks. One of my students mentioned that he was a lawyer for a firm specializing in immigration law and that a challenge they regularly had was to make sure that the myriad of forms were filled out correctly and consistently. These forms were being done in Word.
Because many clients were having many forms filled out, he wanted some way to have the paralegals just select the client's name from a list and have the associated personal information automatically filled in. I told him that was easy enough to do and asked if they used Access as well, thinking he could just enter all the clients' info into Access and pull it into Word.
They did use Access at the office, but the paralegals were only familiar with Word and would probably freak if made to use another program. And because of the critical nature of the data, he needed paralegals to be entering the initial client information - data entry clerks wouldn't have the same stake that the paralegals had. So, what was he to do?
Fortunately, because Word now had VBA, he could program Word so that when the paralegals typed in a new client's information the first time in the first form, unbeknownest to the paralegal, that data was being sent to an Access database. Word was used as a database front end.
The paralegals were happy because they didn't have to learn a new program - by just doing what they normally did they were building their database of client information. The lawyer was happy because he didn't have to hire some temporary data entry clerks to enter data that might not be accurate. It was a pretty cool solution.
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