Prompt for saving Normal.dot - templates

I've been experiencing some issues when trying to manually close a Word document created from my VBA project (actually developed with Access 2003). Depending on the method I use, it may prompt for saving Normal.dot and then tell me that it's already opened or being used. This is a little bit annoying, because I'm then unable to close Microsoft Word. A big waste of time.

Some frustration later, I found a little trick to solve my issue. I've decided to post it there because I've been unable to find any information about this problem on Stack Overflow.
Here's how it goes:
Set WordApplication = CreateObject("Word.Application")
WordApplication.NormalTemplate.Saved = True
Nothing really fancy here, but the second line prevents the prompt for saving Normal.dot. It does NOT actually save anything to the template, it just let MS-Word believe it's been already saved.
Be sure that the option to prompt for saving Normal.dot is disabled in your MS Word's Preferences (Tools > Preferences > Save > Prompt to save Normal template). Disabling so will prevent the prompt in normal use situations. However, there might be some issue like the one above when you're creating a document from scratch with VBA (and probably many other languages), always depending on the method you implement to create/open your document.
Hopefully this little line will save you some more minutes of research.

Related

Why isn't my terminal running my updated C++ code?

I am a new programmer and I am trying to use the terminal on my Mac to compile and run the C++ code I write using the Sublime text editor.
I am able to get my code to run using the terminal, however, whenever I make changes to my code on sublime and then re-compile it on my terminal, my terminal doesn't recognize my changes and keeps on running my original code.
Does anyone know what might be happening?
Thank you so much!
I can think of two possibilities that spring immediately to mind. If you're changing your code in the editor, and that's not being reflected in the compilation, then it's likely to be one of the following. Either:
you're not saving the file in the location you think you are; or
you're not saving the file at all.
The easiest way to tell if one of these is the case is to introduce an error into your code(a), like:
int my hovercraft = full of eels;
and make sure the compiler complains about it.
If you're not saving it at all, do so. If you're saving it in the wrong place, you can usually find out where just by doing a Save As and seeing where the default location is.
If you're annoyed that you have to save, and that computers should just "work"(b), Sublime Text has an auto-save feature that may come in handy, courtesy of one Lucy Bain. Instructions (paraphrased) are duplicated here in case that site ever disappears:
Open Sublime
Find Settings and edit the user window (under Sublime Text 2 > Preferences for Mac, just Preferences for Windows).
Add the line "save_on_focus_lost": true.
Save and close the file.
At that point, whenever you click away from a particular file, it should save it.
(a) Some developers seem to have little trouble doing this without even trying :-)
(b) A not unreasonable expectation for a Mac user :-)

How can you "global replace" in Crystal without visual studio?

I had to replace a DB table with embedded SQL in Crystal.
Now I find myself completely amazed that (apparently) I have to open thirty or more formulas one at a time and replace the table name with "Command"
If I select "All formulas" in the replace widget, all the replace controls are disabled.
This is so stupid that I figure I am missing something.
I am working the Crystal files directly in the Crystal IDE. Not able to fire up a C# or VB program to do it for me. I did try a couple of times in the past to edit things in Crystal files with regexp/perl/editors and similar, but that failed due to the Crystal file format.
(S.O. says my question "appears subjective and is likely to be closed." Huh?)
Transitioning from linked tables (Database 'expert') to a command (or the other direction) has always been painful (I've been using the product since v4)--CR doesn't have a good (or even mediocre) way to do this. You should be able to map your command to a single table, but you'll lose field (from the canvas) during the process (because CR will remove unmapped fields). Best practice is to always use a command or to wrap each table.field element in a formula field.
With earlier version of the product, I might have suggested using the SDK to make the change. However, this level of control has been shifted to BusinessObjects' RAS SDK.
If you are interested, have a look at my RptToXml project or its C# replacement.

Custom client app - need ability to control where documents are saved

Okay SO. I need some guidance. I apologize for the length of this post, but I need to provide some details:
I've got someone who is interested in me to do a small project for them. The application in general is a fairly straightforward employee record keeping / documentation app, but it makes pretty heavy use templated Word and Lotus documents. The idea is you select the employee “event” such as commendation, promotion, discipline, etc., and it loads the appropriate template doc and you fill it in from there, and later you can select an employee, view all the “events,” and view the individual documents associated with each one.
Thus, the app must know where the .docs are saved when the user is done.
The client actually has a v1 of this app (it doesn’t do any management of the files or anything, just launches Word/Lotus with the document you wanted to view in a new instance, presumably via a system() call.) We’ve not gotten into a detailed requirements phase, but the client and I agree that for this to really work, some kind of control over where the user saves the .doc’s to is going to be critical , because otherwise the app provides them with the new copy of the template doc, they "Save as" somewhere else, and the app is pointing to the blank copy it provided them with.
Obviously, I can’t think of a way to achieve “Save as” restriction/control in any way via just launching a new instance of Word. The client has the idea of an embedded Word/Lotus instance in the app with the template doc when you choose one, but I’ve few reservations with that:
I’ve dug around online and I’ve read that whichever version of Word I borrow MSWORD.OLB from will be the one the end user would require?
I’ve tried to do the MSDN example of embedding a Word doc from here, but as I’ve come to get used to, the MSDN example doesn’t even compile.
Even if I CAN figure out how to embed a .doc file into their application, I don’t know that I could control the use of “Save as…”
All of this STILL hasn’t touched on Lotus (!)
So… instinctively, I feel the embedded Word/Lotus thing has to be more work than it’s worth in the end.
So I’ve had a few other ideas brewing around.
One is looking into using Office XML (and if there’s a lotus equivalent), and get the user’s “inputs” separately and generate the document on the fly each time. I’m not particularly thrilled with that idea, but I think it COULD work, provided I just use old features to try and stay far backwards compatible.
Get user’s “inputs” separately and generate a document in HTML. Meh. Works, very cross platform and easily parsed and understood, but not good if you want to be able to email it to someone (who emails a .html? Works, yes, very unconventional which to the average user will throw them off) and even worse if you need to email it to someone for revisions…
Perhaps some kind of editable PDF? I know there are PDF libraries out there, and the more I stew on it, the more this sounds like the best option, though I’ve not done much work with PDFs and I don’t know how easily embeddable they are / what options one has when creating them. I know they can be save-disabled, I’ve had that with my bloody state taxes before.
I need some input here. Here’s the TLDR questions:
Is launching a new instance of Word for each .doc as bad as I feel, given user can “Save as” document wherever and then application is left pointing to a blank document?
Is trying to support embedded Word as big of a trouble as I feel like it is / more work than it’s worth / likely to cause problems with supporting multiple versions of Word? (Forward compatibility as well as currently released versions?)
What are thoughts on the PDF plan?
Any other good ideas?
Word does allow for programming some "Save" and "Save As" control via its object model. Any subroutines coded in VBA and placed into your Word template will be copied into all documents generated from that template. Additionally, most menu and Ribbon commands can be intercepted by creating a module containing subroutines named for the intercepted commands. So, for example, if a module contains a sub named FileSaveAs(), any code in that sub will be executed instead of the standard File|Save As command. Lastly, this code will replace Save As commands executed via keystroke, toolbar, menu, or Ribbon.
The code below will launch a dialog box to a predetermined path whenever a "Save" or "Save As" command is executed:
Sub FileSave()
ControlSaveLocation
End Sub
Sub FileSaveAs()
ControlSaveLocation
End Sub
Sub ControlSaveLocation()
Dim Directory As String
Directory = "C:\Documents\"
With Application.Dialogs(wdDialogFileSaveAs)
.Name = Directory
.Show
End With
End Sub
Hope this helps.

help with type of window dialog resource needed

I am writing a windows program (no mfc) and need to output a status line to the operator every few seconds or so. I tried using rich text boxes but after so many hours it seems to hang up. Does anybody have an suggestions on what I can use instead?
People mentioned that my buffers might have been exhausted. I thought I had planned for that. After I had about 1000 lines displayed I would take the first 500 and remove them using the select and cut options in rich text boxes. I still ran into the same problem.
This question appears relevant, and this one too. But they don't give any concrete recommendations for an alternative to rich text boxes.
You might try the Scintilla control (scintilla.org) which does not appear to have any hard limitations on text size. It has a permissive license. It is used by many text editors such as Notepad++, Notepad2, Code::Blocks, FlashDevelop. I haven't tried it personally but there from the documentation it looks easy to use it in a Windows API application. Of course, it might be overkill for your purposes.
If you keep appending to the text in the control every few seconds for hours then you are probably running into some memory constraint on the control or the process. I think you would have this problem with any control you choose given update frequence and how long you're running the program.
Have you considered implementing a simple circular buffer for the content of the text box? Say only keep the last hour's messages. You could maintain a separate log file for history if the operator needed to go back in time for hours.
I ended up writing my own control to do this, essentially duplicating the Output window in Visual Studio. It was a success, but it ended up being much more code than I thought it would be when I started - I insisted on features such as auto-scrolling when the cursor was on the last line, select/copy, bold text, etc. It was backed by a std::deque so I could limit the number of lines stored for the window.
Unfortunately the code belongs to a former employer so I can't share it here.

sketch flow -- how do we rename .xaml and .cs files without breaking sketchflow map?

how do we rename .xaml and .cs files?
would like to be able to keep development in synch with the original sketchflow. i.e. sketchflow has features such as the ability to collect client feedback on a per screen basis, etc.
... I kind of answered my own question here, so I'll post it as a follow up. Asked the original question 9 hours ago on the MS site without response... still trying to work out where the best place is to talk to the community, so sorry for the duplicate.
THE ANSWER (IS THERE A BETTER ONE?)
Context: Sketchflow is a prototyping tool. In large teams possibly you want to keep the prototype seperate from the finished version, or there's a large prototyping phase.
My view is that I really like Sketchflow. It's one of the coolest things I've seen for a while (well done Microsoft).
... so for me, I want the prototype to become a the finished product. I want the designers to step in and make transitions whenever they want. I want the designers to kick the process off, and the developers to put in the detail. I'd like our customers to be able to post feedback at any time during the build process. btw: get your developers to check out MVVM. It's very cool.
My bet is that the feedback could get lost if you make a breaking change (a file rename) -- so just beware of that. That wont be a problem for us. We'll get our file names to make sense and then mostly leave it alone. Of course MS could fix this this by creating a globally unique id (Guid) for each screen that is created. Perhaps they've done this already. If someone from MS reads this, please put this on your requested features list.
THE ANSWER:
So here is the answer that works for me:
don't try to hand-edit the xaml / cs, as all the cross referencing that you might be doing with behaviors will break if you aren't really careful. Typical files that need to be modified: .csproj, Sketch.Flow, xxxx.xaml, and xxxx.cs.
To auto do it, download a tool like Ultraedit. Alternatively, you might be able to just use VS 2010 (untested).
Steps with ultraedit:
(BACKUP YOUR PROJECT FIRST)
Search/Replace In Files...
Find in files... "Screen_1_19"
Replace with... "Welcome"
In Files/Types... "."
Directory...
Match Whole Word Only
Hit "Start"
follow the prompts
rename the files (.xaml & .cs) to be Welcome.???? (where ???? is .xaml or .cs) . Since I use SVN, this step gets done for me in one step (no big deal).
If using VS2010 for steps 1 through 8, be careful do longer string replacements first e.g. Screen_1_19 before Screen_1. I think VS treats _ as a word break. On ultraedit you'll be fine.
If there's interest, in the spare time that I don't currently have, I could release a quick tool to do this on codeplex.
** note: because we are working with XML and XML is very particular about being correct, I close expression blend down, and then reopen it again after the replace/rename to see if I was successful + my screen map still has all the flow lines still drawn in.
answer is above in the body of the question.