Saving a Macro for future use (Office 97 SR2)

[epic60sman]

Hi:
I wrote a little macro to clean up text that I copyand paste into WORD documents. I called it "Hard_plus19" because I was getting 19 spaces after all the hard returns from the text document. Anyway, it is listed under Modules of the NORMAL Project with a name of
"NewMacros". I put it on my Toolbar but it showed up with the caption "Normal.NewMacros.Hard_plus19", not exactly what I wanted to economize on space. So, I tried to convert it to an Icon but I guess it is not as intuitive as I thought it would be. Also, when I use it I get a message similar to "Can not Save to Normal.dot Disk is full -- try deleting some files". Well, in no way is the disk full, so I don't know what is going on. Should I save it as
NotSoNormal.dot or something? Then, when I try to close the document, I get a message that WORD cannot save it toGlobal Template because it was opened with Read-Only access, .. and .. would I like to save the
changes in a template with a different name". So, I say "yes" and give it another name and I get the message that the "disk is full. Free some space ... yada yada whatever".
Anyone know what the xxcv!//+m999 is going on?
I might add that I write most of my Macros and VBA code in EXCEL; that is, I am a novice at writing Macros in WORD, as if no one would have guessed this by now.
I would appreciate some words of wisdom re the above.
Thanks
Stephen

[Gary Frieder]

Stephen,

This sounds like a number of different issues, all rolled into one.

"NewMacros" is the default name for the module which Word automatically creates if you record a macro. There's no need to keep this module name; you can change the name of the module in the VB Editor in the same way that you can change it when working in Excel.
(If you insert a new module from within the VB Editor, it will be assigned a name like "Module1", "Module2" etc, and again you can change the name to something meaningful.)

Another default when you record a macro, is for Word to store the macro (in a "New Macros" module) in your Normal.dot. That is the default but it isn't necessarily the best way to go - you're probably better off creating your own global or add-in templates for storing macros, rather than storing them in Normal.dot. If you look for posts by Charles Kenyon, you'll find links to his website where he's got discussions of deploying templates (and macros) in Word.

When you assign a macro to a toolbar it will show up with the full path name as in your illustration, but you can change this to any meaningful name that you want it to be instead. You can also make it an icon but it does take a little playing around with to work out how to do this.

Regarding the message about being unable to save Normal.dot - that's not the "normal" message you should be getting, but it does appears in some circumstances, some of which are readily explainable and some of which aren't. In Word 97, the most common reason for seeing these messages would be that you have more than one session of Word running. There's nothing stopping you from running multiple Word sessions, but in fact with Word 97 you never want to do so - the problem is that each of the Word sessions is sharing the same Normal.dot, so you start to get access/sharing violation messages if you try to do anything that requires saving a change to Normal.dot.

Hope the above helps,
Gary

[hedgehog]

Another quiet bizarre possibility to get a "Can not Save to XXX Disk is full -- try deleting some files" is, when your path is getting to long. This seams to be a special feature of Word 97 and is fixed in Word 2000.
And just to be on the sure side: Your normal.dot is not write protected either by the file properties or by restricted rights on a network?

Good luck,
hedgehog

[BAM]

Hi Stephen,

You might want to rule out the Nimda virus. One of the indicators is an insufficient memory error.
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[BerylM]

To change the name for a macro on the toolbar,
<UL><LI>rightclick anywhere on the toolbar and choose customise.
<LI>rightclick on your macro button. You'll see a field called 'Name' which will currently hold your full path. Change this to whatever you want it to say instead and press return.
<LI>Close customise box unless you want to change to an icon, in which case follow instructions below.[/list]To use an icon instead of the text name on the button:
<UL><LI>With customise window open, right click on button to have icon.
<LI>Choose 'Default style' to have just an icon on the button, or 'Image and text' to have icon and text name. The icon will be the default macro icon at this stage.
<LI>Click on 'change button image' and select one of the default icons if there's one there you like, or
<LI>Click on 'Edit button image' if you prefer to change the default/create your own icon[/list]Hope this helps