Keyboard Customizations and Macros in WordMail
In my first post on WordMail, I talked about how we fully integrated Word within Outlook for reading and writing emails. From a feature perspective, Word and WordMail are functionally the same. In other words, you have access to much of the same features in WordMail as in Word. However, from a technical perspective, Word and WordMail are two separate processes or entities. This is important to note because keyboard customizations and macros that work in Word will not automatically be available in WordMail. Today, I will show you how to add keyboard customizations and macros to WordMail for Office 2007.
Normal Email Template
As mentioned in this previous post, every document you create in Word is based off of a template. These templates store the look and feel of the document by specifying the appropriate styles. For the majority of cases, Word will use the Normal template whenever you create a new document. Similarly In the case of WordMail, every time you create an email you are creating a document based off of the NormalEmail template.
You might be asking yourself, why have separate normal templates for Word and WordMail, especially if the underlying application is just Word. Well, there are a couple of reasons:
- We wanted to differentiate the look of documents authored in Word 2007 vs. emails authored in Outlook 2007. In the case of Office 2007, Word and WordMail use different paragraph spacing values, which make for a different reading and authoring experience
- Because we separated Word and WordMail it was not possible for two separate applications to access one normal template at a time without running into issues. For example, trying to update the styles as defined in the normal template in both Word and WordMail may result in conflicts and synchronization errors. In other words, we would run into issues where one application had a lock on the template file while the other was trying to write back into the template
The reason I am bringing up templates is because keyboard customizations are stored within a document or template. In the case of email, keyboard customizations are stored in the NormalEmail template.
Keyboard Customizations in WordMail
Since we don't share keyboard customizations between Word and WordMail anymore, you will need to add your customizations separately for each application. To add keyboard customizations in WordMail you will need to do the following:
- Boot Word
- Click the Office Button
- Select Open
- In the Open dialog box, go to the following path %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates\
- Double click on the NormalEmail template
- Once the template is opened, click the Office Button again
- Click on Word Options
- Select the Customize tab, and click on Customize
- Add as many keyboard customizations as you would like
- Make sure to save changes in NormalEmail template
At this point, anytime you create a new email with WordMail you will have access to your keyboard customizations that you have just added.
Macros in WordMail
Similarly to keyboard customizations, macros don't automatically work in both "apps" if you create them in one "app." For example, let's say you tried to run the following macro to insert "hello world" into an email in Outlook 2007:
Word.Selection.TypeText "hello world"
The result you would see is a run time error of 424: Object required. With Outlook 2007 you will need to write your macros with Outlook in mind. Once you have access to the Outlook object you will then have access to the Word object. The above macro can be rewritten as follows to work with Outlook 2007:
ActiveInspector.WordEditor.Windows(1).Selection.TypeText "hello"
In other words, the Inspector.WordEditor property will give you full access to the Word object model.
With WordMail as the editor for other compose areas in Outlook, like tasks and appointments, you can write macros that will work exactly the same way in any of these Outlook items.
Accessing the Word OM in Outlook
By default, you will not see any intellisense for Word objects and properties if you try to access the Word object model in Outlook. Here is a way to remedy this limitation:
- Boot Outlook
- Hit Alt-F11 to invoke the VB editor
-
Tools | References and add the following: (Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library)
At this point in time you should be able to access the Word OM by declaring a document object and setting it to the WordEditor of a given compose note or read note:
In summary, there's Word and WordMail. They offer essentially the same feature set, but are two separate processes or entities.
Zeyad Rajabi
