Good idea or bad?

[Ed]

I'm thinking of some action I'd like to perform in a report document, and it
would be really convenient to use a single "hot key" for each of them. This
would be like running once through the document performing one of six
different actions. Maybe the function keys, since they wouldn't be used for
much of anything else during these operations.

Would it be a good idea or not to run a macro which captures a specific
keystroke and temporarily changes the response, returning the normal
function on macro close? Maybe controlled by a modeless UserForm, as a
visual reminder the macro is still running? What would be the pitfalls?

Ed

 

[Jezebel]

You seem to be talking about two different things here. You can assign
hotkeys to macros (and there are plenty of more-or-less spare key
combinations you could use), which seems simple enough for your six actions.
But it's not clear what you have in mind with the macro that assigns, then
re-assigns those hot keys. The more usual method is to make the key
assignments specific to the template used to create the report. Then they
are available when you have a report active, but not otherwise.

 

[Ed]

I'm looking at creating an add-in to distribute to my co-workers. We
routinely get long report documents with no styles other than Normal, and
only direct font formatting. There is no underlying template for these, as
they can come from any source. It's useless to try and force anything to
happen from the top - we must deal with these docs down here at our level.

The general idea is they would invoke the add-in through a menu command, and
it would pop up a modeless UserForm. The actions performed by the add-in
would be along the lines of running through the document and setting a style
on Figure captions and Table references, and setting a cross reference to
these in a preceding paragraph. (And there are several more sets of related
actions that may need to be performed.) I thought it would be easier to
allow the user to use a single key to perform an action, rather than
remembering a combination of several keys for each action.

Ed

 

[Jezebel]

A toolbar or menu that's part of the add-in would probably be easier to
implement and distribute.

 

[Ed]

I'll probably go with the toolbar idea. I want to reduce everything to the
least amount of clicking or "go here, select this." That was the idea
behind a single keystroke: click on the header that needs a style and press
(for example) F6 (vice press CTRL+Shift+3). A toolbar is probably the next
best thing.

Thanks for the advice.
Ed