Ms Office Tune Up

It’s often useful to create “click-and-type” text placeholders. The idea is that you click the placeholder, and then you type the required text. Figure 1.9 shows some examples of what I mean. I created this document using Word’s Professional theme fax template. As you can see, the document has placeholders, such as [Company Name] and [Street Address].

Figure 1 Word’s Professional theme fax template includes “click-and-type” text placeholders.

These placeholders are actually fields. Interestingly, in Figure 1.10, look what happens when you expose the field codes for these placeholders.

TIP

To display the code for a single placeholder field, click the placeholder and then press Shift+F9. To display the code for all the fields in the document, press Alt+F9.

Figure 2 The placeholders are really just MacroButtonfields that reference a nonexis­tent macro.

As you can see, each placeholder is actually a MacroButton field:

{ MACROBUTTON DoFieldClick [Company Name] }

You normally use a MacroButton field to run an existing macro:

{ MACROBUTTON MacroName DisplayText }

Here, MacroName is the name of the macro you want to run, including the project name and module name; DisplayText is the text the user double-clicks to launch the macro. (You can also launch the macro by clicking the field and then pressing Alt+Shift+F9.) For example, the following code creates a MacroButton field that displays Update Editing Time and runs the Chapter01.Module1.UpdateEditTime macro:

{ MACROBUTTON Chapter01.Module1.UpdateEditTime Update Editing Time }

In the placeholder example, the DoFieldClick parameter refers to a nonexistent macro. When you click within the field and begin to type, the field is replaced by the text.

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