This is how people often produce written reports based on data that’s accumulated and updated in an Excel spreadsheet. We’ve offered a lot of really cool tips and tools for Excel over the years, such as Saikat’s article on producing professional looking charts, and Steve’s article on cool Excel templates for project management.

In this article, I’m going to dive a little more into the background VBA scripting that allows you to actually program connections between data that might be stored in an Excel file and Word documents where you may be producing reports.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to accomplish this once you know how to add the right references, and how to lay out the syntax of the background VBA code.

Integrating Data From Excel Into Your Word Document

In this example, I’m going to start out with a fairly simple Excel spreadsheet. In reality, the Excel file can consist of multiple spreadsheets with lots of data, it doesn’t matter.

So long as you know where the data resides in the spreadsheet, you’ll be able to reach in and grab it using VBA.

Here’s what my sample spreadsheet looks like. It’s a list of expense totals that have been calculated throughout the entire year.

Now, lets say you have a manager that would like to see a nicely formatted report that describes the expenses, grouping together like items and laying it all out in a layout that’s a little more pleasing to the eye (and easier for the big boys upstairs to understand).

You can do this by incorporating objects like textboxes or labels into your Word document. When you’re in Word, just click on the Developer menu tab, and then select “Design Mode” in the Controls box. Use the Legacy Tools dropdown icon to find where you can insert labels into your document.

Once you have the label placed in the document where you want it (not always an easy task), you’re ready to program the data feed. But first you’ll need to name the label so that the VBA can identify it. Right click on the label and go into Properties. Find the “(Name)” field and call it something that you’ll remember.

Now, add a Command Button from the same Legacy Tools dropdown list, place it in your document, and double click it to open up the VBA editor. When you get your code working later, you can modify it so that the code runs on the Document Open() event. You’ll see that in the object dropdown boxes in the editor window.

To get started connecting Word to Excel, you’ll need to reference Excel. Click on Tools, and then References. Scroll down the list until you see the “Microsoft Excel 12.0 Object Library” and select it.

Once you’ve done this, the rest is just a matter of writing a ridiculously simple VBA script to pull in data from an Excel spreadsheet and automatically update the label caption with the data. Here’s how that works.

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
Dim objExcel As New Excel.Application
Dim exWb As Excel.Workbook
 
Set exWb = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("c:\temp\expenses.xls")
 
ThisDocument.yrTotal.Caption = exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(12, 2)
 
exWb.Close
 
Set exWb = Nothing
 
End Sub

See how that works? The “exWb” Excel application object opens the Excel file at the path you provide it, and it’ll go right into the specific sheet and cell number, extract the data, and place it into the Caption property of the label that you named “yrTotal“.

Here’s the VBA macro in action.

The hard part with dealing with labels in Word is that it’s sometimes hard to align it at the end of a sentence or alongside any other text.

One way of overcoming that is actually incorporating some of the text alongside the data in the VBA code itself.  As you can see here, I’ve put the static text right into the Caption when I create the label itself.

Now, all you have to do is include that text when you update the label with your VBA script, and just append the data from the Excel file to the end of that text. Here’s what that kind of code would look like.

Dim objExcel As New Excel.Application
Dim exWb As Excel.Workbook
 
Set exWb = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("c:\temp\expenses.xls")
 
ThisDocument.yrTotal.Caption = exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(12, 2)
ThisDocument.totHotels.Caption = "Hotels: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(5, 2)
ThisDocument.TotDining.Caption = "Dining Out: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(2, 2)
ThisDocument.totTolls.Caption = "Tolls: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(3, 2)
ThisDocument.totFuel.Caption = "Fuel: " & exWb.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(10, 2)
 
exWb.Close
 
Set exWb = Nothing

You can use the string concatenation “&” symbol to place connect the static text with the data extracted from the Excel sheet. Here’s what the final results look like in the updated Word document.

Again, if you don’t want to have a big, ugly grey command button in your word document, just have the data-update script run on Document.Open(), and it’ll all take place behind the scenes.

In fact, in many cases you could create the initial document once, and then you’ll never have to create it again. All you’ll have to do is open it, and all of the labels will automatically update for you with the data from the updated Excel file. All you have to do is click to Print, and submit the report to your manager. A 30 minute report just turned into a 1 minute printout!

Can you think of any other cool uses for this data-integration technique using VBA? Share some of your own ideas and thoughts in the comments section below.

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Brainstorming your ideas visually helps with clarity and allows you to connect ideas and interlink them together. That’s where mindmapping took off. You might know zilch about it, but even age old habits of doodling your ideas is better than a blank page. But you don’t have to draw aimlessly because MS Word offers you a few free templates to structure your ideas and sharpen your thought process.

Let’s fire up MS Word and take a look at 8 free Office.com templates that help you generate ideas with Microsoft Word. You can use the search field to get to the template if you have a specific term; you can drill down the categories; or you can follow the links below.

Story Map Templates

The Story Map template looks suitable for writers who are trying to outline a plot. Alternatively, it can be used by students, as intended to plan out a narrative. But it can also be used to plan out a team role-play for a given situation when you are trying to connect a solution to the underlying problem by assigning specific roles to team members.

Process Chart

This is a very simple step-by-step chart that can be used to describe the flow of a process. You can use the process chart to break down a complex event into a sequence of smaller action steps.

Event Map

I have tried using this Word template while plotting the idea for a short story – and it worked. Along with the Story Map template, the Event Map can be a useful tool for beginner writers.

Spider Map

The Spider Map is a little like a conventional mind map. The large central circle represents your main idea, and the branching linear lines can be used to jot down the subsidiary ones. The description says that you can use the spider map to investigate various aspects of a single topic or just to organize their thoughts about a subject.

Umbrella Chart

To be frank, I haven’t figured out a way to use this MS Word template effectively yet, so I have yet to find out how versatile this graphic organizer is. The description says that you can arrange the details of any subject or topic using this visual aid. What I have learnt is that the umbrella chart can be used to represent a core idea and the subordinate ideas around the spokes.

KWL Chart

Using this simple columnar template, you can easily track what someone (or you) knows (K), wants to know (W), and has learned (L) about a subject. It’s a very handy aid for studying and also if you are trying to research something. Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation on its use, and as it says the KWL template can be used to reduce repetition by leaving out prior knowledge and focusing on the W (wants to know). Based on this, students can concentrate on what exactly they want to learn or how and where they want to learn it from.

T-Chart

Every issue has two sides and this template helps you to examine both sides of the same coin. The T-chart is a graphic organizer that can be used to look at different viewpoints and broaden your view on an issue. Anything that can be broken down into two opposing views can be stated using the T-chart.

Fishbone Diagram

The Fishbone diagram came out of Japan (not surprisingly). Also called Ishikawa diagrams, they are somewhat advanced idea organizers in comparison to the others we have on this list. This diagram analyzes the relationship between a cause and its effect. You can use it to drill down into the root cause of a problem by organizing a complex cause-effect event into categories. The Fishbone diagram is widely used in quality control.

The templates are mere tools. Ideas and brainstorming effectiveness will depend on how well you put them on paper or on the screen. But MS Word and its gallery of templates give you easily downloadable files that can be turned into idea organizers in a flash. Customize the templates by changing the text labels and/or adding to the sections.

Are you a brainstorming kind of guy? Tell us how you go about it and tell us especially if MS Word is on your list of tools. What do you think of these brainstorming capable templates?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Now, Microsoft has released a temporary fix. The fix is not a patch, but rather a workaround that involves using the command prompt to disable access to T2EMBED.DLL. Alternatively, users can have this taken care of automatically with the Microsoft Fit It utility.

Microsoft warns that using the workaround will cause embedded font technology to no longer work correctly. Applications that use it will “fail to display properly”. Microsoft does not elaborate, but this most likely means embedded fonts will not appear and instead be replaced by a default font. Webpages sometimes use font embedding to allow users to view web text in a font that’s not installed on the user’s computer, for example.

While the workaround does provide temporary protection, a patch is being developed to close the exploit and allow for safe use of embedded fonts. It will be release automatically via Windows Update once it becomes available. No release date has been promised.

For our readers at home, our original advice – don’t open Word documents found in emails – is a perfectly adequate solution. Businesses with multiple computers, however, would be wise to use this fix.

Source: The Guardian, Microsoft Security TechCenter

Basically, this virus enters your system and could potentially allow malicious individuals into your system where they can take control and take all kinds of data. This would obviously be especially bad if you have credit card information on your computer or if the virus ends up on the system of a corporation where there can be all kinds of private data. Worse still, they could target government, similar to Stuxnet.

This virus could very well be made by the same people who made Stuxnet, or at the very least, their source could have been stolen to create this Duqu virus.

As of now, there is no fix for this virus. For the time being, we suggest that all of our users be extremely wary of all Word documents they receive, especially if you don’t know the person who sent it.

Source: Reuters

The Document Map is a separate display (in the form of a left-sided pane) that helps you navigate through a long Word document and access different parts of it. Think of it as a jumping off point for reaching different sections in your document. It is almost a control center for moderating different parts of document.

Let’s put the definitions aside and look at how it can help us become better office workers and writers.

How Does The Document Map Help Us?

The Document Map does not help us to write better. But it does help us a lot when it comes to format our writing quickly by applying different visual styles easily. More than that, the Document Map really comes into its own when you have a long document and you need a ‘navigational guide’ to move around it. It is the map of your document. It is not a table of contents list though.

The Microsoft Definition Of The Document Map

Here’s how The Document Map is described by the guys at Microsoft Office.

The Document Map is a separate pane that displays a list of headings in the document. Use the Document Map to quickly navigate through the document and keep track of your location in it.

Switch On The Document Map

Getting to the Document Map is a simple as clicking on the View – Navigation Pane in MS Word 2010. In Word 2007 and earlier versions, you can click on View – Document Map. Alternatively, you can use the shortcut of Alt – V –D.

As in the screen above, it is the small icon that says – Browse the headings in your document. Strangely, it’s not called the Document Map in Word 2010, but we will keep using that.

Uses Of The Document Map

Now, that we have nailed down the location of the Document Map, let’s also peg down a few uses we can put it to.

Display All Headings

If you have applied the heading styles to your documents (by using the Styles in the Home tab), the Document Map lists all document headings in the navigation pane. Subordinate heading levels are displayed in a hierarchical manner.

Jump From One Heading To The Other

For particularly large documents, using the navigation pane is a time-saver as you can hop from one heading to the other with a click.

See Where You Are

It’s easy to lose track of exactly where you are in a large document. With the navigation pane/Document Map open, you can see that the section is highlighted in orange as you move from one part to the next.

Quickly Change The Heading Levels

Changing the structure of your document is easy as a right-click with the document map. With the headings displayed, you can click on Heading Level 2 and promote it to a Heading Level 1. That is you can change the hierarchy of the paragraphs quickly. You can just as easily demote one section of text under a heading level and bring it under another.

Drag Headings Around To Rearrange Your Document

Like to re-organize your document in jiffy. Simply select the paragraph (i.e. the heading level) and drag it to another location. All heading levels and paragraphs nested under it (i.e. at a lower-level to it) will move along with it.

A Few More Document Organization Aids

As you can see in the right-click menu of the navigation pane, you can select a section of a document and print the heading and the content. The Document Map is also a quick way to outline your document by adding new heading levels and filling them up with content.

Document Map is a great tool to exploit if you like working with multi-page Word files and document styles. You can go and re-organize your old MS Word documents using the Document Map and the Navigation pane. With it, you don’t need to scroll down, but simply glance through the hierarchical list of headings to find the important tidbit of information. It lets you see how the whole document pans out.

Do you use the Document Map and the Navigation Pane? Were you aware of this MS Office and MS Word productivity tip?

Some people choose to bookmark all the pages that they find temporarily useful for whatever project they may be working on, while others go through the long, common processes. Going to the page in Firefox, copying it, opening Word, pasting the content into Word, and then saving it.

Instead, there’s a better way to do things, and the first step to that is to install this nifty Firefox add-on called Notesaver.

Getting Started

The said add-on, named “Notesaver!”, can be installed by visiting this page in the Firefox add-ons collection, and will be active once you restart the browser. The page says that the add-on is for Windows only, but I’m not sure if it could be used on other operating systems as well because it doesn’t require the use of Word itself.

Once that completes, you’ll see that there isn’t a special button for Notesaver to be seen anywhere. Instead, you’ll only see it right when you need it. Whenever you right-click while in the browser, you’ll get your usual list of options that Firefox provides along with a new option called “capture”.

Menu Options

Going further into this menu will lead you to two options:

If you don’t have anything highlighted when you right-click, the first one is CREATE_FILE, which will create a new, empty Word document.

The second option will be File Options, which will let you change the order of the most recent files created that are shown (more on that later).

If you did have something highlighted when you right-clicked, you’ll only see one option named DEFAULT_FILE. If you haven’t done so already, clicking on DEFAULT_FILE will result in the add-on asking you to set the default path of your Word documents, along with options to change the number of recent files that should be be shown, and whether or not the date and time should be appended to the end of whatever you’re saving.

Useful Tips

If you keep saving content by clicking on DEFAULT_FILE, you’ll see everything you saved in the default.doc file.

However, you can right-click when nothing is highlighted, and choose the CREATE_FILE option to create a new one, and then when you try to save content again you’ll see two options, the default file and the newly-created file.

The number of files shown that you could adjust earlier is talking about this list right here. Whenever you highlight something and then right-click, you’ll see up to the number of files chosen in the settings. Note that these settings can also be changed via the Firefox button –> Add-ons –> Extensions –> Notesaver! –> Options.

Conclusion

There’s really not much else about this add-on, which is good because there won’t be any extra fat that you’ll have to ignore when you use it. It’s simplistic, and works great for when you need it. Saving highlighted content to a Word document can be a major plus for some people, who may need to work with Word anyways, and having the content already saved to a local file would be the best option.

For some people it might be beneficial simply because they would rather not use cloud services like Google Docs or Evernote to store their clipped content. Whatever the reason, this add-on definitely enables you to work as efficiently as you wish. If Notesaver isn’t quite what you’d like, you can also check out other recommendations such as Scribbly, or choose one by looking through this list.

Image Credit: Shutterstock ]]> http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/clip-notes-firefox-word-document-notesaver/feed/ 6 http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/customize-ms-word-2010-ribbon-adding-tab-commands/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/customize-ms-word-2010-ribbon-adding-tab-commands/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:31:24 +0000 Saikat Basu http://www.makeuseof.com/?p=83839 We have seen quite a few ways to tweak MS Office 2010 for our own productive ends. Granted, the whole MS Office suite is a productivity tool to begin with, but there’s still some spanner work you can do to make it more personalized.