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Word Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Your Text Review by Thomas Duff
Excellent resource for Word and COM programmers...
It seems like the Hacks series just keeps getting better and better. This time I had a chance to review the book Word Hacks by Andrew Savikas (O'Reilly). As usual, there are a number of items here that I'll be able to use right away...
Chapter list: Word Under the Hood; The Word Workspace; Formatting, Printing, and Table Hacks; Editing Power Tools; Templates and Outlines; Housekeeping; Macro Hacks; Forms and Fields; Advanced Word Hacks; Word 2003 XML Hacks; Index
For those unfamiliar with the Hacks format... It consists of 100 tips, tricks, or unique ways of doing things with the subject at hand (like Word, Excel, etc.). The hacks are normally not things that you would find intuitively obvious, or even things that you thought were just flat-out impossible to do. In Word Hacks, the author (along with a number of contributors) takes you on a trip into the inner world of Word and uncovers a multitude of tricks you've probably never seen...
Wonder how to get IE to launch Word documents in Word? That's hack # 8. Need dummy text to fill out content in a document but you don't want to just type random characters? Check out #14. How about using Word as a Windows backup utility? Yes, you can do that, and hack #81 shows you how.
The thing I like most about this book is the profusion of VBA code to be found. For non-programmers, this might be a hindrance in that a lot of the hacks involve using the VBA code they supply. I can think of a number of potential readers who would be totally lost there. But for developers who use COM to manipulate Word from other software packages, this is a treasure trove of ideas. An excellent "R&D" resource... "Rob & Duplicate"! :-)
If you're an average user of Word or a power user who doesn't want to play with code, you'll get some value here. If you're a techno-geek who wants to program everything, this is your book. Highly recommended...