A better way to ...? (Word2003)

[tom_hall]

Hi -
I get a report ftp'd to me daily, however it's supplied with no formatting (just a text file)
I need to reformat it - currently I need to: Change font, change font size, insert page-breaks, change paper orientation to landscape, and save it in word (.doc) format
Obviously a Word macro would fit the bill, but there are other complications, in that other people also need to do the same reformatting, and the reformatting spec may well change, and that I want no user interventions - I would therefore like to do the conversion in batch-mode
Can someone point me in the right direction ?

-Tom

[Rudi]

Hi Tom,
Certain things can be automated, ie - Remove all formatting, changing orientation....etc. There are other things that are much more difficult to entirely automate...ie, Inserting page breaks, adding formatting to areas of the document.
I'm not too sure if it would be possible to entirely eliminate human intervention.
I have no exposure to batch file updates in word, so I cannot advise in that direction, but if you can give more details as to what repetative formatting must be applied and to what areas of the document it must be applied too, I'm sure you can be pointed into a good direction from that!

[jscher2000]

I think the first step is to record your steps and, assuming you're a little bit familiar with VBA, edit them to be efficient and foolproof. Foolproof means that no user intervention is required to execute the steps, no exceptions.

Second, you'll need to add any necessary looping to your macro to repeat steps that need repeating (i.e., cases in which Select All and change font, or Find and Replace All doesn't do what you need).

Third, you'll need to write a "master" macro that subjects your reports to the formatting macro. We've had a number of examples of that third one here in the Lounge in the past years, for example, code that does something to every file in a folder.