atw: Re: Prev. posted cleanup of dreaded char char

That's my girl! Lock em down and throw away the key is my motto too :-) 

<evil laughter with extra reverb and echoing>


Truly evil and subversive tricks to play on unsuspecting users
==============================================================

Have to kills: 

Many entries on the formatting pane. 

Extreme surgery: Tools > Options gets the boot and you replace it with
things like a triple view state selector (drafting, technical, proofing) and
a "Set Interface Options" button. This latter button keeps your auto macro
code minimal so thus initial lag is minimised (being lysdexic I HATE that
word! Hate it hate it hait et). Never make the mistake of filling up your
autocode with 10 seconds worth of processing :-)


Must dos: 

Provide a toolbar button for every style on a group of toolbars.
Autotexts, autocorrects, boilerplates of all kinds - including std H&F, (c),
title pages with fields etc
Styles for all occasions.


Just for the sheer pleasure of watching them squirm:

A global template with Document_Open and _Close events that register the
document by a simple append to a networked text file. You then weekly run
scans on this file and discover illegal activity (copying controlled files)
and then are left with document activities for your registers and logs.

Save dialogs that force them to use the correct folders. Extreme cases like
forms have no dialog, they just autosave with the correct name in the
correct location and possibly start a notify process.

A document automation server with a logged on user id that runs a scheduled
event every hour or so to load Word with your template and thus VBA to start
doing polls on 'watched folders'. This can be the interface for document
registry updates (eg that text file into your excel workbook) and email
notifications with outlook automation. This saves your personal machine
carrying bollocky loads of code! You just set up folders for regularly
performed macro sequences, and the server will process them for on its next
run. With a shortcut to a batch file on the server on your desktop, you can
even force immediate processing of any folder(s) and shell to that batch
file from your VBA to kick it off! The server spends its half an hour
auto-indexing or whatever, and the author gets back to work immediately on
another document. They will get their copy back at some point.

Trap all errors and send notifies to an email address - yours of course.

You can even tag custom properties / doc variables to identify the type of
processing so that documents can undergo multiple pass surgery. A simple
user form on your desktop submits the file by tagging with your selections &
the original path name, saving as into the watched path and destroying the
original. The server processes then saves back into the original path and
destroys the server side copy.

Little bit of initial work to set up, great for the long haul. In a few
years you'll have that thing running at 80% capacity with numerous authors
getting their stuff auto copy-edited and so on. The more automated
facilities that server provides, the more productive your authors will be.
Your common interfaces to Excel and Outlook will enable RAD of the rest of
the required toolset :-)

Steve Hudson

Word Heretic, Sydney, Australia 
Out-evilling the evil empire
www.wordheretic.com
ABN: 86 453 419 554   
Free Association of Words
Without prejudice



-----Original Message-----
From: Elizabeth Fullerton

No assistance required! - if I get around to doing it, it will be a
pleasure. Plus I won't tell them. They spend enough time breaking their
machines, it will be fun to do it *to* them instead of fixing it *for* them,
for a change!

<evil laugh/>

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