PCFormat Forum Archive

Hi everyone,

I work at a law firm in the IT Dept involved in custom application dev there. As you can imagine...most of the lawyers use MS Word for everything. We have custom templates for letter etc etc.

Now, we need some new templates written and a bunch of other custom additions written for Word. I have been told VBA is whats used to do this...and as I have VB experience, I thought it would be fine.

But...isnt VBA very old? Is there not a newer relase of it I can use instead like VBA.NET or something? I dont want to get VBA if its real old software...I wanna use the latest stuff.

Also...what books can be recommended for VBA etc? Any and all help will be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks

VBA is like a castrated version of VB5.

What do you do in the templates that require VBA?

there's always VB.net ... which will require that you deploy the latest .net runtime as well..

there's a tonne of online tuts available..

rustypup wrote:there's always VB.net ... which will require that you deploy the latest .net runtime as well..

Yes, I recommend that you Google for "Visual Studio Tools for Office" if you have Visual Studio and some decent programming knowledge. It's harder to do, but more worthwhile.

The Office object reference model (Google for that too) will also be of great help.

Thanks for the input so far!

Ok...so the lawyers use word. We have custom templates created with VBA for the way documents need to be presented. So if they are doing something involving litlgations, they can select the litigation template and it sets all the font, line spacing etc etc for the document. So we need VBA to created these templates and manage them, and insert menu's into word to they can easilt select a desirec template etc.

There are also other additions we will be adding like being able to click on a selected ending for certain documents and it inserts it instead of them having to retype the same standard conclusion every time.

With some documents, it needs to insert a specific letter head or footer automatically...so ja...we need to use VBA for this.

Some lawyers open an Excel file in word and it messes up. Then we get helpdesk calls saying whats going on etc etc. So ja...they dont even realise what they do sometimes...so VBA will also be used to check the right file is opened with the right software...basically need to check for user error...

No disrespect to lawyers...but they are lazy...and we need certain additions added onto Word to make things easier for them. Understandable I guess.

I wanted to use Visual Studio Tools for Office, but I see its only for Office 2007...and we have Office XP. So Im gonna stick to VBA for now...as they need it yesterday....then will upgrade when we move to Office 2007.

So there ya go...the full story! If anyone has some input...PLEEZ share...thanks for the help thus far

I did my in-service training as developer @ Old Mutual with VBA and got everything I needed from http://www.ozgrid.com/forum

Shweet. Thanks....will take a look!