Re: Can I Automatically Insert Section Breaks?

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Ned: a few points in reply to your firehose-type post :-)

a) I have Word 2000. Provided there is only a single section in a
document, and that the author has already set up headers and footers,
Word defaults headers/footers of new sections to the "Same as
Previous" setting. I confess I hadn't even thought of this - the OP
made no mention of additional constraints - but I just re-tested this
with a sample footer, to verify that this is what actually happens.

b) Existing section breaks - nope, didn't think of that either. :-)
Caveat emptor - the OP should know enough to use what she asked for in
an effective way. And to indicate (even if in follow-up posts) any
unforeseen side-effects/consequences.

c) For a macro done and tested in 15 minutes, there is a hell of a lot
that can go wrong, yes. As you say, this work is uncompensated, and I
can't afford to take half a day off work to put together a killer app
which would take care of all possible needs, present and future, that
the OP may have had. I know I sound sarcastic there, but I'm not
intending to be sarky - this is just another statement of cold fact.
In its present form, the problem was small enough that I could take a
15-minute break and run off this macro. I cannot justify hours spent
on solving a single problem - without generating any revenue for the
company... To be honest, if the OP had to include a spec as large as
what you're hinting at, I would have run. Far and fast. :-)

d) "I like the view of tech writing as writing with technical tools
(code is a good example).": I like that, too. Recently, I wrote a VB6
app to automate generation of a Word doc from book-review records in
an Access database (which I designed, and included a spiffy form for
data entry, as well). I have also recently worked on a series of
macros for maintaining and combining chapter documents into a single
Word document, for a major client in the US. Both of these were
situations where it was more than appropriate to write code, since it
saved several hours of manual work on the docs.

e) I used to be a VB programmer (9+ years at it) and have learnt to
overcome the urge to build everything and the kitchen sink into an
app. From a designer's point of view, I agree that it is
soul-satisfying to provide bells and whistles capable of rendering a
symphony in an app, but those instincts have to be tempered with
practical considerations. Time and money are those practical
considerations. I'm no hacker, just a little above a mediocre
code-churner. It takes me time to code, and on company time I can't
afford to spend hours working on turning out the best section-break
app that ever existed :-) since that would amount to dereliction of
duty.

Nor, without incentives, would I consider spending hours of my
off-work time on something with such a limited scope, and which serves
one single person's needs. If I was helping build a tool which did a
lot of helpful things and could be used by a wide cross-section of the
TW community, that would be a worthwhile expenditure of time. Not a
one-off like this.

f) "my silence on Ed's snippet conveyed my concerns adequately": Nope
- it didn't. OTOH, this *huge* post of yours DID convey your concerns,
in a form that I'm sure a lot more of us understood - compared to the
silence! :-)

Regards,
Ed.

On 10/18/06, Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com> wrote: