Showing files that have comments in them (Word 2000)

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I’m an editor. Just as a book has chapters, a book project folder has files. Some project folders have 70 or 80 files (lots of little chapters). As I edit each file, I insert comments — the ones with the little yellow stickynotes — to keep track of things I have to research, and the MS isn’t finished until I clean all those up. So anyway, as I clean things up, I delete the comments. When I’m all done, all the comments in all the files are gone. Pretty straightforward.

Consider, 70 or 80 files, working on a project for a month — by the time the project should be done, little snags in early chapters are long forgotten, and you have to open a file to see if there’s a comment in there. They don’t wave at you from the File Open dialogue box. And so it’s easy to forget that a particular file has a question still hanging fire, and it doesn’t get answered before it’s time to ship off that MS to the graphics department. Sometimes the comment makes it into the galleys — a bad thing! There’s got to be a way to make Word help.

Can Word display a list of which files in a folder have comments in them? How do I tell it to do that?

Thanks for your help
A.

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I don’t have a direct answer for you. However, in post 133116, the user had a macro that opened documents & deleted graphics. Perhaps it can be modified to search for & report if any comment reference styles exist in a document. I would assume that you delete all the comment reference marks to delete the comments & only use the style for comments.

You might even want two macros. One for information and one to double check & delete all comments before sending out the documents…in case you missed something. Of course, since I’m not a VBA expert, it’s easy for me to come up with a solution that I can’t carry out.

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Editted by Andrew for more resillient code and to work for 2000 rather than just XP
(Thanks to post that follows this)

Try the following – open any file in the target directory and make sure that any changes to it have been saved prior to firing up the Macro.

The Macro creates a new document containing hyperlinks to all those that contain comments. Hope that helps.

Option Compare Text
Option Explicit
Sub TitlesList()
‘ This is a generic routine to obtain a set of files and then generate a document
‘ containing Hyperlinks to that set
‘ Designed so that simplistic tests of ‘properties to filter’ can select
‘ Documents with particular attributes
‘
Dim FS As Variant
Dim FO As Variant
Dim FL As Variant

Dim ListString As String
Dim ListStringURL As String
Dim I As Long
Dim IMax As Long
Dim MyTemp As String
Dim MyDoc As String
Dim MyPath As String
Dim DocMustBeOpened As Boolean
Dim DocWanted As Boolean

MyPath = Application.Options.DefaultFilePath(wdDocumentsPath)
If Documents.Count > 1 Then
If ActiveDocument.Path “” Then
MyPath = ActiveDocument.Path
End If
End If

ChangeFileOpenDirectory MyPath

Set FS = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Set FO = FS.getfolder(MyPath)

Documents.Add
MyDoc = ActiveDocument.Name
DocMustBeOpened = True

For Each FL In FO.Files
MyTemp = FL.Name
If Right(MyTemp, 4) = “.doc” Then
DocWanted = True
If DocMustBeOpened Then
Documents.Open FileName:=MyTemp, ReadOnly:=True, _
AddToRecentFiles:=False
If ActiveDocument.Comments.Count = 0 Then
DocWanted = False
End If
ActiveDocument.Close savechanges:=wdDoNotSaveChanges
End If
Else
DocWanted = False
End If
If DocWanted Then
Documents(MyDoc).Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=Selection.Range, Address:= _
MyPath & “” & MyTemp, SubAddress:=””
Documents(MyDoc).Paragraphs.Add
Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdParagraph
End If
Next
Set FS = Nothing
Set FO = Nothing
End Sub

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Andrew, I’m curious whether you are using XP, because I don’t seem to have an Application.FileDialog object/collection in Word 2000, which obviously presents significant issues for testing the macro.

Also, you will want to change the ActiveDocument.Close line to:
ActiveDocument.Close SaveChanges:=wdDoNotSaveChanges

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Oops, and oops

Yes I’m in XP. Yes, I’ll fix that code

I’d been oscillating around how to open files.
I’d started with Filesearch but have discovered it can go away for minutes at a time.
I took to file objects as a last resort, and finally found filedialogue which I liked.
Given the question was posted for 2000 I’ll modify it and repost a corrected version that’ll run there.

Thanks for the comments

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Jefferson

This time … ?

I ran a test in my version of 2000 – the file opening is kludgy, simply because I don’t know of a neat way to do a user driven directory browse in 2000.

Any suggestions from anywhere?

Andrew

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You can use API calls, but there’s also an easier way. Full details are in an “IVB tips” e-mail that I kept when I received it on 8th October this year. You might find the full text by going to http://www.elementkjournals.com/tips.asp and searching for the tip called ‘Leverage the “browse for folder” dialog box from your VB application’.
In short, you create a project reference to the Microsoft Shell Controls and Automation component (exposed in shell32.dll), and use the BrowseForFolder method of an object set up as “Shell32.Shell”. The tip includes sample code.

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I also found (in parallel) a reference via MVP pages (http://www.bmsltd.ie/mvp/%5B/url%5D) to something Jim Rech had gathered.

Edited Mar 13th 2004 to update link

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Not wishing to stray out of my depth and appear foolish, I have a low tech solution that may serve as a temporary stopgap. When I am working on pupil records/reports or building up a stock of lessons for a scheme of work, I know that I will need to amend them before the tasks are completed. I tend to save my initial documents with a suffix appended to the filename, e.g atomsU.doc, where the U stands for unfinished. When I return and clean up I resave without the U and delete the original.
Also, it may be easier to construct a macro that would recognise the suffix.
Just a suggestion but given in good faith.

Rob

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Hi Rob:
Thanks for that idea. I tend to think that the “low tech” solutions are often the best. And there are a number of freeware or shareware renaming utilities (or if you still have winfile.exe, you can rename everything in one fell swoop). Of course, that won’t help determine which files you should rename.

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