PAST MEETINGS

LOCATION: Covington & Burling
1201 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., 11^th Floor
Washington, D.C.

HOST: David Finnegan

TOPIC: Creating Word Form Templates

SPEAKER: David Finnegan - David is the VBA Developer at Covington & Burling so his primary function is to design all the Word automation for the firm. David also use to teach Visual Basic template programming for Tamaroff so he's no lightweight!

DESCRIPTION: Here are the things David covered.

• The Registry: David focused on two branches, the system branch and the user branch. The settings in the system branch are stored in the system.dat and the settings in the user branch are stored in the user.dat.
• Always backup the registry before you begin hacking away at it. You can use the REGISTRY/EXPORT menu command to export the registry (or a particular key) to your desktop before you begin. You can edit the exported reg file by right-clicking on it (binary format). However, if you double click on the exported reg file, it will put all the old settings back into the registry of the machine you are sitting at without first asking you if it is okay so be careful about doing this.
• The Word key: the data branch of the Word key stores most of the tools/options menu settings. The data key seems to be the source of Word problems more often than the normal.dot global template. To solve problems with the data key, delete it from the registry and it will rebuild itself upon entering Word.
• If you ever want to troubleshoot Word problems to see if the registry is to blame, load Word from the START/RUN command with the syntax "winword /a". Have the user work like this for a while to see if the problems persist.
• AutoCorrect: the check box settings for the AutoCorrect feature are stored in the registry, but the word list is stored in an ACL file usually stored in the C:/WINDOWS directory.
• The Options key: stores the Word file locations.
• The Common key: stores the user template (local) and the workgroup template (shared) locations. Under the common key the autocorrect area stores the path to the ACL file on the hard drive.
• Alt+Shift+F9 will check and uncheck a checkbox in a form if the checkbox was created using the checkbox field.
• Below zip file below contains a bunch of sample templates that David demonstrated in the meeting. To understand the forms, look at the Visual Basic programming as well as any bookmarks or form fields.