Category Archives: MS Word

Bye Bye UserVoice!

Frog Leaving

I reported it for several years now that UserVoice was a complete waste of time!!!

Let me be more specific, the general idea was a great one, but rather it was the implementation, administration and follow through with the core principle of such a site that made the it a complete waste.

You can check out my findings by looking over:

Microsoft’s UserVoice Announcement

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Word – Date Field + 30 days

Working With Fields

First off, let me state I did not create the original code (I provide the link below to the original source). I merely tweaked it to display/format the output in the way I needed it to.

I was trying to help a client with what I thought was a simple request, add a current Date value in one location and in another, add a Date value for 30 days from today.

Now the first request is very straight forward and takes 2 seconds (Insert -> Date & Time), but the second request turned out to be a nightmare to accomplish.

To accomplish this using a Date field, well, it turned out to be a total nightmare. Not only is the formula itself extremely complex and not for the fain of heart to tackle, but working with Word Fields themselves is a complete and utter nightmare (You can’t copy/paste the Form Field formulas, so you have to manually retype formulas from scratch, seriously who comes up with this?! Microsoft, please fire these individuals!!!)! So, if you are going to go down this avenue arm yourself with some serious patience!

Below is the final Field formula that I used for my specific case:

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VBA – Determine MS Office/Application Bitness

Just a quick post. Have you ever needed to determine the bitness (x32 vs. x64) of Microsoft Office?

Yes, you can go File -> Account -> About Access and get the information from the pop-up dialog, but what if you want to determine this in your code, using a VBA function?

Using Conditional Compilation Directives

I started digging, thinking I could easily extract such information from the registry, boy was I wrong there. With all the variations of Office (MSI, CTR, …, x32, x64, …) it’s a nightmare to navigate! What a mess Microsoft has made for developers to have a hope in hell to keep all the registry keys and variations straight. Anyways, I ended up going back to basic, and the answer was Conditional Compilation Directives. With a simple Conditional Compilation Directives I had my answer.

'Determine if the current application, thus Office, is running in x32 or x64 bitness.
Function Office_Isx64() As Boolean
    #If Win64 Then
        Office_Isx64 = True
'    #Else
'        Office_Isx64 = False
    #End If
End Function

Nothing more to it than that.

Using the Application GUID

Based on Andreas Harke’s comment, you can also determine the bitness of an application by reading the 21st character of the application GUID. So you can do something like:

Function IsOffice32Bit() As Boolean
'https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-suite-issues/numbering-scheme-for-product-guid
'   p => 0=32-bit, 1=64-bit
    IsOffice32Bit = (Mid(Application.ProductCode, 21, 1) = 0)
End Function

Long Live the Office Toolbar!

Better late to the party …

Well, it would seem Microsoft has realized we are now using large displays, high DPI monitors and their Ribbon was a huge waste of space. Only took them 10+ years! So they are finally looking to give us back a leaner/meaner Toolbar Style Ribbon.

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MS Access – How to Manually Update Access/Office 2016

With all the ongoing issues with Access/Office 2016 and the updates coming out of Microsoft, it has become a necessity to know how to Update and Revert (Microsoft’s new term for Uninstalling Updates) Access.  I’ve already tried to cover the subject of Reverting your Office/Access installation in my previous post Microsoft Office 365 – Uninstall an Update.  So today, I thought I’d cover the subject of performing a manual update.

Unlike Reverting, Updating is surprisingly easy!

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MS Word – Bug – Cannot Turn Off Design Mode

The Problem

I was revisiting an old word document which included some Content Controls.  I would

  • Open the document
  • Enable Design Mode
  • Disable Design Mode (or at least try to)

and would receive the following error message

Word cannot turn off design mode because placeholder text in a content control contains invalid items. Placeholder text cannot contain items such as floating objects, revision marks, or content controls. Remove these items from the placeholder and try again.

  • How is it there was no issue creating the document many moons ago?
  • How is it this error occurs even though I haven’t made a single change?

 
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MS Access – VBA – Kill a Process

Every once in a while, programs do not shutdown properly and thus cause headaches. So it can become necessary to terminate the process. Below are a couple different approaches you can employ to terminate, forcibly close, a process/program.
 
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