Ms Office Tune Up

One of my goals in this book is to present you with tricks that are practical in the sense that you can use them right away to be more productive or more efficient. I also try to focus on reducing drudgery, mostly by automating tedious or routine tasks with macros. This section’s trick isn’t even remotely practical, but I think it falls somewhat into the “reducing drudgery” category, as you’ll see (I hope!).

We all have certain documents that we use almost every day. A good example is a to-do list that is checked constantly throughout the day and that is added to or deleted from as nec­essary. Any document that you look at many times a day gets boring awfully fast. To add some visual interest, Listing 1 presents a macro that applies a random background texture to a specified document.

Listing 1 A Macro That Applies a Random Background Texture to a Specified Document

Public Sub ApplyRandomTexture(doc As Document)
Dim i As Integer
‘
‘ Initialize the random number generator
‘
Randomize
‘
‘ Generate a random number between 1 and 24
‘
i = Int(24 * Rnd + 1)
‘
‘ Apply the random number as a background texture constant
‘
doc.Background.Fill.PresetTextured i
End Sub

Word has 24 predefined textures, and these are given the numbers 1 through 24 in the Office object model (these are msoTexture constants). This macro uses the Rnd function to generate a random number between 1 and 24 and then uses the PresetTextured property to apply the random texture. Note that the macro takes a Document variable named doc as its argument. To run this macro each time you open a document, display the Visual Basic Editor, click the doc­ument’s project, and then double-click the ThisDocument object. In the Object list, select Document and in the Event list select Open. In the Document_Open() stub that displays, add the ApplyRandomTexture ThisDocument statement, as shown in the following:
Private Sub Document_Open()
ApplyRandomTexture ThisDocument
End Sub

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