Re: Word 2007 customizations vs Word 2010: Questions and Rant

[Deborah Hemstreet <dvora -at- tech-challenged -dot- com>]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your response. I suppose, from a certain perspective Office 
2010 is a jump ahead. But again, everything I've read says that my 
Ribbon customizations are transferable only in whole and cannot be 
template specific. Again, defeating my purpose.

But quite truthfully, from my perspective, its all glitter. I don't want 
to deploy an enterprise template. I don't want to deploy a start-up 
template. I want a very specific template for a very specific purpose to 
save myself and two other people a LOT of work by implementing macros 
and enabling quick access to all the commands we need without having to 
remember a thousand shortcut keys and move our hands from the keyboard 
to the mouse and click on different ribbons to find what once was all in 
one spot. And they only need these macros, shortcuts, buttons, etc. when 
working on a specific type of document; definitely not at startup and 
available for every document.

I do not believe this is an unreasonable desire.

Microsoft could have incorporated everything you mentioned, and still 
made it possible for people like me to (and I am convinced there are a 
lot of people like me) to get to the work of writing, authoring and 
designing, and forget about all the programming.

Finally, after a LOT of research, I learned that the SendKeys VBA 
command was broken on Vista, and this was not corrected on Windows 7. I 
was advised that this was not to replace with a different command, or a 
subtle enhancement, but something that literally was not considered a 
big enough issue to ever repair. The workaround required a lot of 
programming which a colleague knowledgeable in these things kindly 
provided to me.

You see, not everyone wants an enterprise solution. And not all 
technical writers are programmers. It has been nothing short of 
miraculous in my eyes, that I've been able to grasp what I do of VBA 
programming code. And in fact, not all IT departments have the foggiest 
idea how to cope with Word templates. I am working in a hospital on 
their journal. I am the first person in the history of this hospital 
that ever wanted, needed, and designed a template. The IT department has 
no understanding at all of what I need or how to do it. I talked with 
them earlier today and they want to get a consultant for me, but again, 
they don't know who knows about these issues!

Basically, your response confirms that my problem is very real. Word 
2003 development it is. I need a template for a very specific use that 
would have been done two days ago if I'd made it in Word 2003. So I will 
finish it tomorrow, transfer it to 2007, and that will be the end of the 
story. All the commands needed will be on the Add-Ins tab, and that will 
be the end of the story... until Microsoft somehow finds a way to 
prevent that from working too (and I'm sure they will one of these days).

Thanks for taking the time to respond! And please forgive me if I sound 
a bit irate. I'm not mad at you, just a situation that is preventing me 
from getting to my work... and forcing me to waste time on things that I 
shouldn't have to waste time on....

Have a great weekend.

Deborah


On 08/31/2011 6:09 PM, Tony Chung wrote: