Robert Delwood - The Secret Life of Word: A Professional Writers Guide to Microsoft Word Automation

• User interface: This form of automation uses items that can be selected from the user ribbon or placed in the document. Examples include user forms, fields, Quick Parts (new in Office 2007), and user controls such as text input areas, and checkboxes.
• Macros: The other form of automation, macros, is perhaps less familiar. Macros let you record and recall tasks so you don't have to repeat them step-by-step. Your use of macros can include: running ones others provide to you, recording your own, modifying recorded macros, and programming macros.

This book is for Word users who want more control and insight into Word's automation capabilities. Automation was never intended to only be for programmers. Instead, automation is equally useful for writers. To be clear, this book is not about programming or making you a programmer. I understand not everyone is interested in becoming a programmer just to accomplish everyday tasks. Instead, I intend to jump start the automation process and enable you to write automation solutions yourself.

I assume you have some experience with Word. Although many of the examples include detailed step-by-step procedures, this is not a Word tutorial. Automation is partly about stringing Word functions together, but knowing what those functions are their options, the right combination, and the right sequence is up to you. Seasoned Word users, or power users, can benefit from this book, but so can less experienced users.

This book takes a pragmatic and realistic approach to learning automation. It is part cookbook and part tutorial. I encourage you to work through the examples line by line. For code examples, you can type the code into the integrated development environment (IDE) or copy and paste from the electronic samples provided on this book's website. Feel free to experiment and try variations.

The coding style and examples are different throughout the book, allowing you to see differences and make your own choices. For example, unless otherwise noted, samples use For...Next loops and For...Each loops interchangeably. Since the automation challenges differ for each writer, no book of examples can address them all. Instead, study several examples and use whichever examples and code work best to construct the solution you need.