Category Archives: MS Word

How to Expand All the Microsoft Roadmap Items

If you’ve ever seen any of my posts about the Microsoft Roadmaps, I typically provided a screenshot showing all the items expanded. For instance, in my post:

Microsoft Access Roadmap Update

Did you notice that the Microsoft Access Roadmap was updated today? If you haven’t seen the road use the following link: So what has changed and where do we stand today?!

Microsoft Access Roadmap Updated, Again

In my previous post a week or two ago I highlighted the evolution of the Microsoft Access Roadmap and talked about some oddities with the current roadmap with ETA contradicting written statements leading to confusion… (read the article for all the details). Well, I recently revisited the roadmap and it changed again! So this is the current roadmap as of June 6th, 2022 (I think it was actually implemented around June 2nd, 2022 but could be mistaken).

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Smart Indenter Is Alive

One of my preferred add-ins for VBA development for many years was a small little indenting utility called Smart Indenter. It did one thing, automatically indent code to make it much more legible, but it did it well!

It has always been part of my add-ins page because it was so good:

Microsoft Access Database Add-ins, Tools, Etc.

One thing any good worker will tell you is that you must have the right tools to do the job. Computer programming, MS Access database development, is no exception to this rule! I thought I’d try and list a few add-ins and other useful tools that I have come across, or heard of, in the hopes it could prove useful to other developers. This is an unbiased listing and I have no financial gain from any of the tools listed below. I am simply trying to regroup them to help you find them, and you can judge their usefulness on…

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Sadly, it seemed the product was abandoned by its’ developer some time around when Office 2007/x64 surfaced.

Over the years, I have seen people reporting various hacks to make the older version work with newer versions of office (I report a solution that worked for me), but others report those same hacks not solving the issue for them. So it was a little luck of the draw if you could get it working. I had a few posts on this as well:

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How To Sanitize A Filename

As a part 2 to my post on Validating a Filename to ensure it conforms to Microsoft Windows naming convention, refer to:

Determine If A Filename Is Valid

It is quite common in applications to allow the user to specify a path and/or filename for saving files. As such, a best practice would be to validate the user’s input prior to blindly using it and perhaps getting errors and crashing our applications. Thus, I thought I’d quickly share one possible way to tackle this.

I also wanted to demonstrate how we could alternatively sanitize any proposed filename. So instead of validating, or reporting back issues with the proposed filename, how we could simply eliminate the issues and return a valid filename.

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Determine If A Filename Is Valid

It is quite common in applications to allow the user to specify a path and/or filename for saving files.

As such, a best practice would be to validate the user’s input prior to blindly using it and perhaps getting errors and crashing our applications.

Thus, I thought I’d quickly share one possible way to tackle this.

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Microsoft Word Bug – Character Count Is Wrong

Seems to be a trend by the Microsoft Word Dev Team, similarly to the Word count being incorrect

Microsoft Word Bug - Words Count Is Wrong

While working on my recent article I also developed a Word automation function to utilize Microsoft Word’s built-in word count. I figured it might have been the easiest solution to getting a quick and reliable word count from any string. Boy was I wrong.

in my testing, so is the character count!

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Microsoft Word Bug – Words Count Is Wrong

While working on my recent article

Counting the Number of Words in a String

Have you ever needed to count the number of words in a string? Let’s explore a few ways we can achieve this.

I also developed a Word automation function to utilize Microsoft Word’s built-in word count.

I figured it might have been the easiest solution to getting a quick and reliable word count from any string.

Boy was I wrong.

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Counting the Number of Words in a String

Have you ever needed to count the number of words in a string?

Let’s explore a few ways we can achieve this.

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How To Count The Number Of Characters In A String

Ever needed to get the character count of a string?

Easy enough, right! Simply use the Len() function.

lLength = Len("My string to get the character count of.")

But what happens if you want the character count, but ignoring one or more characters? What if you don’t want to count “spaces”, or perhaps punctuation?

What do you do then?

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Impact of VBScript Deprecation

As an FYI for those of you curious, I’ve been trying to ascertain the true impact of the VBScript deprecation.

Sadly, the official announcement provides 0 details whatsoever as to the impacted libraries/components. Feel free to check for yourself by using the 2 links provided below:

Deprecated features in the Windows client - What’s new in Windows

Review the list of features that Microsoft is no longer actively developing in Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Resources for deprecated features in the Windows client - What’s new in Windows

Resources and details for deprecated features in the Windows client.

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How to do Hashing & Encryption in VBA

We live in a world where data security and communications need to be stored and transmitted safely. Hence, it is evermore critical to use hashing and/or encryption/decryption techniques.

I’ve previously discussed this a little and provided a couple possible approaches:

Get a String Hash using VBA

Since I was already working on Get a File Hash using VBA it made sense to look into how one could hash a string directly. The basic principle remains identical, in the larger sense, that is I use VBA to run a PowerShell script and return the generated Hash, but this time we need to use the -InputStream parameter to be able to use a string directly. I won’t bore you with the detail, you can review the code for yourself.

VBA - Get a String's Hash

In a previous article, I demonstrated how we could utilize PowerShell to get the MACTripleDES, MD5, RIPEMD160, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384 or SHA512 HASH of a string I figured I’d also demonstrate how it can be done using plain vanilla VBA, no need for PowerShell at all.

Today, I wanted to provide yet another possible solution to this matter.

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