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Subject:Re: Condition text in Word (2000) From:"Chuck Martin" <twriter -at- sonic -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 10 Jan 2002 15:47:00 -0800
"Win Day" <winday -at- rogers -dot- com> wrote in message news:135630 -at- techwr-l -dot- -dot- -dot-
>
> At 02:49 PM 10/01/2002 -0800, Chuck Martin wrote:
> >I've been working in VBA, using what limited skills I have in that
language,
> >but one of the issues is that I cna't find a way to mark text with
invisible
> >characteristics (as opposed to the visible characteristics of font size,
> >color, bold, etc.). If I could create custome character format, then I
> >could, say, make a section of text as Product1, which would not appear in
> >the Product 2 version, and when I want to create a Product 2 manual, I'd
run
> >a macro to make all Product1-marked text hidden, then re-generate the
> >pagination and TOC.
>
> You CAN make custom character styles. When you make a new style, make it
a
> character type instead of a paragraph type.
Doggone it, you're right. But I think I missed something is describing the
situation. While you can indeed create custom character styles in Word, I
can't see a way to apply more than one character style to any piece of text.
So in a test document, if create 2 custom character styles, Product1 and
Product2, then I try this:
This is text with no character style applied.
This is text with Product1 character style applied.
This is text with Product2 character style applied.
This is text with both Product1 and Product2 character style applied.
I can't apply 2 character styles to the last paragraph. (At least, I don't
know how to if it can be done.)
>
> Also, have you considered using some kind of mail merge? I haven't played
> with the merge function much, but you might be able to customize that
somehow.
>
We've thought about it, but mail merge introduces a whole 'nother set of
complexities, and the custom information then has to be maintained in a
separate document of some sort. We thought of using a table in a SQL
database, as that's what our prodcut uses, but Word's mail merge function
won't read SQL databases directly.
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