Replies

Try looking on the View tab; there’s a Switch Windows button over on the right side. I have never used the Windows menu in Word very much, but I believe this will do the same thing for you. You can put it on the quick access toolbar if it feels “buried” on the View tab (it sort of does to me).

I realize this is a tangent, but in the spirit of presenting options … I’ve found Dark Room to be very useful. It’s a minimal word processor that basically gives you a totally blank screen for typing in. You can set your own background and text colors, and it saves to simple text files, which you can open in Word or copy/paste to wherever.

Of course this won’t help if you need to work in Word or simply prefer to, but I have found Dark Room to be very good for basic drafting and editing — situations where I don’t want to worry about formatting or style, just the words that I’m writing. And I find a black screen with light blue text to be much easier on the eyes than a glaring white page in Word!

One small factual correction; C++ is not required for modifying the Ribbon. I don’t know the first thing about C++, but I have made a (very) modest start in working with RibbonX. Here are the resources that got me started:

Custom UI Editor Tool
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 1 of 3)
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 2 of 3)
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 3 of 3)

All right. I ran chkdsk and then proceeded with cloning, which went very smoothly and quickly. After some fumbling around with cables and jumpers, the old drive is out, and the cloned one is up and running. All appears to be well, though I’ll check things out more carefully tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for your help!

Whoops. I have not done a very good job of explaining my situation! Apologies, I was in too much of a hurry this morning to make myself clear. Take two:

Old setup was two internal drives. The primary drive is failing, BUT still working. The second drive was for backing up the primary drive. The plan is to turn the “second” drive into the “new primary” drive.

I purchased an external USB hard drive, and used TrueImage to make a full backup onto it from the primary (failing, but still working!) drive. I did realize that I would lose all the data on the second drive by restoring to it!

Last evening, I disconnected the primary drive, set up the second drive in its place, and tried to restore to it from the USB drive. Which seemed to work, until the status screen got down to five minutes left … and hung.

When I get home tonight, I will check the BIOS to see if the drive is recognized — this is getting into unfamiliar territory for me, but I at least know how to get in and look. Though if the drive was not recognized, why would the whole restore process seem to run, and only hang at the end? It seems to me that it should not have been able to start in the first place.

I may yet fall back on cloning the drive in order to get the machine running again, but I would still like to test the restore function to make sure it works in case I ever need it. Results so far have not been encouraging (but I’m not blaming the software yet, at this point it’s just as likely I messed something up). If I use the cloning feature to get the machine working, is there any way I can set things up to test a restore, without taking the chance of turning a functional machine into a non-functional one if it doesn’t go well?

Thanks,

I have TWO hard drives, one of which is failing (it’s not quite dead yet), one of which I’ve always used for backing up files. I purchased an external drive for backups, and am trying to turn the old backup drive into the main drive for this machine. So I was trying to restore to the “backup” drive.

To head off the question … yes, I saw there is an option to clone the drive, which may be a more obvious (maybe also more sensible) thing to do. But this is my first chance to test restoring from an image, so that’s why I tried it. Would kind of like to be sure the software I’m depending on for backups will work when I need it (and now I’m glad I tried it, before it’s an emergency)

I don’t have time to poke around in BIOS, etc. right now, will have to come back to it later. I have very little experience so far in working with hardware setup, BIOS setup, restore images, and so on, so I’m trying to treat this as a “learning experience” (instead of a “pain in the rear-end” experience )

Thanks!

As I said, up WAY too late last night. Thanks!

In playing with this a little bit, it seems that if I try to change the attached template and turn off the “Automatically update document styles” setting at the same time, the styles get updated regardless; but if I first uncheck the update styles checkbox, click OK to close the dialog, go right back into the Templates and Add-ins dialog, and then change the template, the styles are not updated. Does this work for you?

Okay, I think I can get something to work from here. Jan Karel and Rory, thanks to you both!

Ah-ha, that makes sense; but if I’m understanding correctly, it doesn’t get me exactly where I’m trying to go. Please allow me to further clarify what I’m looking for:

When someone opens the spreadsheet file, the add-in file is automatically opened in the background, because the spreadsheet has a reference set to it; but when the spreadsheet file is closed, the add-in is not closed too. It stays open in the background until Excel is completely shut down. So if a user closes all of their open spreadsheets that access the add-in, but continues to work in other spreadsheets which do not need the add-in, the menu will still be available on the toolbar. I would prefer, if possible, that the menu only be available when it is needed, i.e., when one of the special spreadsheets attached to the add-in is open.

The only way I have thought of to do this is to keep track of each spreadsheet as it is opened and closed (not EVERY spreadsheet, but just all of the ones attached to this add-in), so that I can tell when the last one is closed and delete the menu. I think I can make something like this work, but it gets a little involved. I was looking for alternate ideas, in case there’s a simpler way to do it (maybe there just isn’t a simple way!)

Thanks very much,

Beautiful, that’s just what I need. Hans and Legare, thanks to you both.

5. I note that it doesn’t specifically say that the four men are all playing EACH OTHER … could it be that they are all playing in different games against other opponents?

I have some code working for this, but also keep finding new questions. In Excel, I have created an add-in with a class module for my application event code, following examples in VBA’s help and other places on the internet (including here). However, in Word there is already an add-in using much the same method of accessing application events — a class module, with an object declared as Application, etc.

What is the best way of arranging my new code around the existing add-in? Can I create a completely separate add-in, with its own Application object and code, to run alongside the one that’s already in place? Or is it better to add my new code to the existing add-in, so there’s only one “hook” into the Word application rather than two concurrent ones?

I hope this makes some sort of sense; working with classes is very new for me, and though I’m fumbling my way through it, I can’t say that I truly understand what I’m doing yet.

Thanks!

Thanks for the clarification. As I suspected, your solution is much MUCH more complex than what I’m doing, so I think the DocumentBeforeSave event will be sufficient for my purposes. Still useful to have another option on standby, though. Thanks!

Beautiful. That’s exactly what I need — thank you very much!