Herb Tyson Word Bible Blog

Welcome to the new location for the Word Bible Blog. Not only am I gearing up for Word 2010, making the old Word 2007 Bible Blog dated, but a javascript exploit had found its way onto the old site. I’ve removed it, and automatically redirect old hits to this page. If you visited the old site within the past week or two, you might still have the script in your cache. If you clean the cache by removing cookies and temp files, it should no longer be a problem.

Many Word 2007 users miss the ability to press Shift+F5 to return to the last place editing occurred in a document they open. Shift+F5 executes Word’s built-in GoBack command. It continues to work just fine in a document you’re editing, cycling among the current and last three places editing occurred. However, it does not work for a document you’ve just opened in Word 2007.

If you’re up for a little bit of very simple VBA programming, you can create the ability to automatically return to the spot where the cursor was the last time the document was saved. It works like this. When you close a document based on Normal.dotm, if you have a macro named AutoClose, that macro gets executed each time you close a document. When you open a document, if you have a macro named AutoOpen, that macro gets executed.

Note that you can set this up in other templates as well, but putting the system into the default global template—Normal.dotm—will handle most of the documents most people edit.

So, the first step is to create AutoClose (if you don’t already have an AutoClose macro), and include in it the instruction to insert a bookmark. I named this bookmark LastEdited. You could call it whatever you want. You could call it UncleFreddy or AuntPetunia. It doesn’t matter, as long as the act of setting it is contained in an AutoClose macro. The macro looks like this, at minimum:

Sub AutoClose()

    On Error Resume Next

    ActiveDocument.Bookmarks.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Name:=”LastEdited”

End Sub

So, each time you close a document based on the template that contains the AutoClose macro, a bookmark named LastEdited is created. I’ll bet you can see where this is going.

Each time you open a document, if the underlying template contains a macro named AutoOpen, it gets executed. So, guess what we’re going to have that AutoOpen macro do! Right! We’re going to have it take us to the LastEdited location. At a minimum, the AutoOpen macro will look like this:

Sub AutoOpen()

    On Error Resume Next

    Selection.GoTo What:=wdGoToBookmark, Name:=”LastEdited”

End Sub

That’s it! Creating the macros and setting the security is up to you. I said “at minimum,” because you might want your AutoOpen macro to do other things, like set the zoom at 140%, put the file location into the title bar, or fix you a cup of tea. These frills are entirely up to you.

You might be wondering what the On Error Resume Next is for. That’s there in case the macro encounters some kind of problem. The first time you open a document, for example, there will be no LastEdited bookmark. Without the error handling statement, you’d get a nastly little dialog box. Or, what happens if you’re editing a protected document and can’t create a bookmark. Same deal. The error handling statement keeps you from getting an error message.

One side effect of this system is that you will always be asked whether to save the file. That’s because inserting the bookmark is an edit. If you say No to saving changes, then the bookmark will not be saved.

So, what happens if there’s already a bookmark named LastEdited? Simple—it gets overwritten by the new one. If you think there’s some chance that there’s an unrelated bookmark named LastEdited in any of your documents, then give this one a different name… like TheInsertionPointLocationTheLastTimeThisDocumentWasSaved.

Did you know that you can customize the keyboard in Outlook 2007 message editor windows? You won’t find it in the list of commands or otherwise in the interface. However, Outlook 2007 uses Word 2007, sort of, as the message editor. As a result, many things that work in Word, also work in Outlook’s message windows—even things that the interface doesn’t seem to know about otherwise.

Someone in a newsgroup wrote earlier today that Shift+Tab works to decrease the indent in Word 2003, but does not do so in Outlook 2003. That’s also true in Outlook 2007. Tab, by the way, increases the indent in both Word and Outlook 2003. Hence, the question: how can you decrease the indent using the keyboard in Outlook 2003. As far as I’ve been able to determine, you can’t unless you’re using Word as your message editor. The answer appears to be Ctrl+Shift+M. But, I don’t have access to Outlook 2003, so I can’t be sure.

However, the exercise of trying to find out led me to using my tried-and-true ToolsCustomizeKeyboardShortcut key assignment in Outlook 2007. It works in Outlook 2007 message windows! In fact, it works in any formatted Outlook 2007 window (such as the notes area in Tasks and Contacts).

Basically, it works like this (the same way it’s worked in every version of Word for Windows):

Press Ctrl+Alt+Plus Sign (on Number Pad).

This turns the mouse pointer into a cloverleaf shape:

When the mouse pointer is this shape, Word (and Outlook, too) will tell you the key assignment of the next command (keystroke, ribbon, QAT, menu) you exercise—if there is one. It will also let you make a key assignment in the process. So, for example, if I open an Outlook message window and I press Ctrl+Alt+Plus Sign (on Number Pad) and then click on the Decrease Indent tool, I see the following dialog box:

Then, I wondered: Can I use this to make key assignment? And, if I do, will they stick around for the next Outlook session?

The answer is Yes! The changes are saved in NormalEmail.dotm, which is the default template for email messages when using Outlook 2007.

So, if I want a keystroke for Decrease Indent, I just click in the Press new shortcut key: field, then tap the key combination I want to use (such as Ctrl+Shift+T), click Assign, and then click Close. Now, I can press Ctrl+Shift+T (which for me is kind of logical, since I used to use Ctrl+T for Tab).

What’s the catch? Well, thanks to my old friend Mike Shacter, I now know that this will not work with all keystrokes. Even some that are ostensibly “unassigned” according to the Customize Keyboard dialog box cannot be used. Why? I don’t know. Ctrl+Shift+T worked. Maybe I got lucky, because if I’d tried Alt+F12, I would have discovered that it didn’t work, and I might have given up, thinking that key assignment in Outlook didn’t really work.

Since receiving an email from Mike Shacter, I’ve discovered that you cannot successfully reassign keys that are already assigned. The dialog box will claim that you’ve succeeded. But, despite the dialog’s having told me that I successfully reassigned Ctrl+R to EditReplace, Ctrl+R continued to apply right alignment to the current paragraph. This was true of other already-assigned keystrokes as well.

But, I’ve also discovered that “unassigned” keystroke were not all created equal. Ctrl+Shift+4 claims to be unassigned. But, I was not able to use it. Ctrl+Shift+( also couldn’t be used. Ctrl+Shift+[, however, could. So, if you pursue this “trick” for Outlook 2007, keep in mind that you might need to experiment to find something that works.

PS Don’t be surprised if this works in Outlook 2010, too.