We are blessed with amazing clients that are happy to share the experience of their journey working with us.

We have a new Case Studies page on our site which will be regularly updated with stories about our engagements with our clients.

A new feature in DocAssist as of build 1094 is “Clippings”. We like to think of clippings as an easier and more versatile version of autotexts or building blocks. As you probably know, autotexts and building blocks can only be saved to templates, there’s not many options for organising them, sharing is a pain, and updating them is even more painful.

So what are Clippings. Well they are really just documents that can be inserted in to another document. Not hugely exciting until you see how they can be used.

First of all you need to configure the locations for the clippings. You can have up to 3 locations currently. We recommend Personal, just for you, Shared for your department or practise group, and Precedents for firm or company wide clippings. The locations can be on a network or local – whatever works best for you.

If you have DocAssist build 1094 or newer, you will see the configuration settings within the Settings.xml file.

Now create some clippings. In a Word document, highlight some text you want to reuse as a clipping. Then press Shift Alt S (the shortcut we usually setup – or run the SaveClipping macro) and you will get the following screen.

Save Clipping screen

Select a location to save to, and then select a folder. You can also right click to create your own folders, or rename existing ones.

Give your clipping a name, and also an optional code, and hit save.

What’s the code for…that’s the fun part. Create a new document in Word, and then type in the code and press F3 (or run the InsertClipping macro) DocAssist will find the clipping and insert it in your documents – just like an autotext/building block.

And for those clippings you don’t have a code for, or you forget the code, you can browse all of the clippings that are available just by clicking on the Clippings button on the ribbon.

Browsing for clippings

So now you have a simple way to save your own autotexts, or share them with your department or entire company or firm. You can create a standard set of codes to have them easily and quickly inserted in to documents. Plus you can create your own taxonomy for sorting your clippings.

And to top it off, you can even create shortcuts to specific folders within your clippings. So you can have options on the ribbon to say insert an execution clause, or insert an address, and it will bring up a list of all clippings from that location.

This is a very simple yet powerful feature and has received great feedback so far, so make sure you give it a go. It’s all now part of DocAssist.

I’ve been having an extremely strange issue with a custom application. Basically the application is a form that displays to the user so they can select some options relating to how they want to print a document in Word. The form then goes off and does a few things with the printer driver and prints the document as required.

For some strange reason the form started playing up recently, and users were reporting that it was locking up sometimes, and the only way you could close it was to end the WinWord process in Task Manager which is a little drastic!

With a bit of debugging (and luckily being able to replicate the issue) I found the problem code was calling the DocumentPropertiesA function from winspool.drv. This was the part of the code that was updating the printer driver with the new settings. All of a sudden the call was not returning in some instances, but in a strange twist execution was returned to the form. No exception was returned. I enabled all the controls on the form to test further, and it turns out the form was indeed active again, and the buttons would work, but you could not close the form.

A bit of research reveals you cannot close a form if there is another event still running. So I guess the code running on the OK button event was considered to be still running.

If I clicked on the OK button again, the same code would run, but at the same line of troublesome code would actually return an AccessViolationException error, and you could not continue the code.

So a bit more research and yes, AccessViolationException is bad, and your code should stop.

But here’s where it gets interesting. In versions of .Net 3.5 and earlier, an AccessViolationException would get passed back to the CLR and you could trap it. As of version 4 it does not. Well thanks for that Microsoft. You can read all about it here. That was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Turns out the fix is pretty simple. In the class that was running, I added the following imports statement

Imports System.Runtime.ExceptionServices

Then on the actual sub that was running, I added the following attribute

<HandleProcessCorruptedStateExceptions()>
Public Sub Update()

And voila, the TRY CATCH around the problem line picks up the exception.

I can now catch the problem. Turns out it’s not fatal in this case, and the code can keep running, and even more strangely, it works. I suspect there is still another problem that needs a little more investigation, but I’m now back to a print dialog form that appears to work the same as before which no longer locks up. So happy users, and happy developer.

If you feel like reading more on exceptions, then here’s a little more light reading that you may find interesting, I know I did. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419661.aspx#id0070035

Sometimes you need to add a slight pause in your VBA code to make things work properly. Here’s a few ways to do just that.

Firstly, using the Timer function. This is what I use most of the time, it’s great if you need to wait a specific amount of time.

Sub Wait(ByVal Seconds As Single)
    Dim CurrentTimer As Variant
    CurrentTimer = Timer
    Do While Timer < CurrentTimer + Seconds
    Loop
End Sub

With this routine you can also pause for parts of a second by using

Wait 0.5

The most common method I find in code is just using a For loop with nothing in it. Change the value of the loop in order to vary the time of the pause.

Dim i as integer
For i = 1 to 1000
Next i

The problem is you don’t know exactly how long it will pause for, and it will vary from computer to computer. It’s not an exact science, but it often solves the problem, and hence why I see it around so much.

Another method is to use the Sleep function that is part of the Windows API

Declare Sub Sleep Lib “kernel32” Alias “Sleep” (ByVal dwMilliseconds As Long)

Sub Wait(ByVal Milliseconds as Long)
   Sleep Milliseconds
End Sub

This method is good as it’s accurate down to the millisecond.

And lastly a method that is a little different to those above as it doesn’t pause your code but instead triggers code to run at a particular time. With this method the rest of your code after the call will continue to run, or if it’s at the end of your routine, then control will pass back to Word while waiting for your code to run.

Application.OnTime Now + TimeValue(“00:00:05”), “NameOfMacroToRun“

Just change the “NameOfMacroToRun” to (you guessed it) the name of the macro you want to trigger, and it will run in 5 seconds time. The cool trick you can do with this is use it to run code at a constant interval while Word is running just by getting the macro to call itself again. For example:

Sub CheckSettings
   ‘ Do whatever you need to do…
   If Application.UserInitials <> “cp” then Application.UserInitials = “cp”
   If Application.UserName <> “Mosmar” then Application.UserName = “Mosmar”
   ‘ Run again in 10 seconds time
   Application.OnTime Now + TimeValue(“00:00:10”), “CheckSettings”
End Sub

Whilst this is probably a bad example, you get the idea. Whilst Word has plenty of events you can hook into, there’s lots that don’t exist (like selection change within content controls). By using the above you can replicate the functionality of events and create your own in VBA. Maybe I’ll save that for another blog post.

There are other ways to achieve a pause in your VBA code, but they are generally variations of the above so I won’t cover those. That’s what the rest of the internet is for.

Just found something very interesting in the release notes for WorkSite 8.3 SP3 Update 5 – all SDK components are now backwards-compatible with all previous 8.5 versions. Woohoo! No more updating code when going to SP3. That alone is worth the update!