Word 2002 SP3 - change font color creates new style - breaking mac

[Hank Roberts (at the office)]

Help!

I had slowly put together macros that would take a tab delimited database
dump -- a list of names and codes and numbers -- off of our mainframe, and
turn it into a nicely formatted office phone directory.

I did this entirely with styles -- no direct formatting. But I used
character styles that only changed font colors -- so I could find a unique
long string (containing for example a foreign city name and an eleven digit
number) and paint that green, then find a string of eleven green numbers and
break it up into four numbers, hyphen, three numbers, hyphen, four numbers.

This broke completely with Word 2002 -- Word 2002 creates a new named style
if I apply a character style that includes changing the font color of the
character. So my subsequent searches don't find the characters, because
Word has changed their style name and my search doesn't know what they're now
called.

I suppose I should have used strikeouts or crawling ants or something
instead of colors. Now, what to do ....???

Any suggestion welcome -- ideally some way to turn off this new feature in
Word 2002 and make it leave the style names the way I create them.

I'm not a macro expert; I did this slowly by guess and by gosh, got some
help from experts who aren't available now -- so I can't just rewrite the
whole macro.

Any help welcome.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?SGFuayBSb2JlcnRzIChhdCB0aGUgb2ZmaWNlKQ==?=,

Word 2002 creates a new named style
if I apply a character style that includes changing the font color of the
character. So my subsequent searches don't find the characters, because
Word has changed their style name and my search doesn't know what they're now
called.

this doesn't sound right... Can you give us an example of such a "named style"?
And show us the code that creates it, please, as well as detail how you do the
search.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Hank Roberts (at the office)]

It's been a few months -- and the problem's gone! The only thing that's
changed that I am aware of is a big bugfix for the "MacPac" macro set
(misnamed, this is Word 2002 -- but that MacPac stuff was very buggy).

Although we are very, very secure here - meaning us grunts in the trenches
have very little idea what's actually being done with the software -- my
guess is that this problem was a bug in the company's specially customized
version of Word (it's a customized SP3 release with MacPac addons and PCDocs
addons and what else all).

Anyhow. After 18 months of hair tearing, the problem's gone away entirely.

I'm seeing normal Style names, with Font color -- rather than new styles
that included color names added onto the style names.

Arrrrrrrrgh.