Messianic Lectionary for Oct 2021 - Sep 2024

Thanks!

Dudley Rose said:

Wyn, this is very impressive. Would you be able to share how you set up the milestones and field codes in the Word document. I like how they are not visible and seem to be connected to Styles, but I can't quite figure it out.

Hi Dudley, I'm not Wyn, but I did write Word (or was one of the team of developers who wrote it).

You can turn on all hidden text (which is what Wyn used to hide the field codes in this document) by pressing Ctrl+* (i.e. Ctrl+Shift+8). (This will also show visual representations of whitespace characters: spaces, tabs, paragraph marks, etc.). There's also a button on the ribbon that does this, on the Home tab. It looks like a paragraph mark:

To turn hidden text off again, just press Ctrl+* (or click the paragraph icon button) again.

To format text as Hidden, you select it, and bring up the Font dialog, and turn on the "Hidden" checkbox:

Here's what the first page of Wyn's document looks like with Hidden text visible. (The text formatted as Hidden shows with a dotted underline.)

Dudley Rose said:

Thanks so much, Rosie, very helpful. I fantasized that he had somehow also managed to embed the codes in the styles so he could apply them with just a click. Is there an easy way to apply the milestones and field tags?

What I do in cases like this is use recorded macros. You need to enable the Developer tab in Word to have access to Macros. And you need to do the whole operation that you're recording using only keystrokes, since mouse clicking on a location to move the cursor there is not a predictable repeatable thing.

You'd have to do this in several passes, to do each of the types of tags. I'll just explain the process for the milestones/tags for each day. I'll leave the rest (the scripture links) up to you as an exercise.

1. Move your cursor to the first spot where you'll want to insert the milestone & field-on tag.

2. On the Developer tab, click Record Macro.

3. Click the Keyboard icon

4. In the "Press new shortcut key" box press a key combination that you know you don't use for anything else in Word. I like the Alt+Shift combinations, but use whatever you want.

5. Click Close.  (from this point on you until you stop recording, you need to be VERY careful to just do the required keystrokes with no stray/erroneous strokes)

6. Type (or paste): [[@YearMonthDay:]]{{field-on:day}}

7. Press Ctrl+LeftArrow 7 times and then press RightArrow once  (this will move your cursor from after the }} that you just pasted to right after the : after YearMonthDay.)

8. Click Stop Recording.

That's your first macro, which you will use repeatedly after finishing these next steps.

9. Now type the date you want to appear here, in the case of the first instance in this particular document, Oct 2, 2021 (you could get more fancy and actually write a macro to grab the text from the document and munge it from the D MMMM YYYY format it appears in in the document into MMM D, YYYY format; but that's beyond what can be done in a recorded macro, and beyond the scope of what I have time to teach you; in fact I rarely write my own macro code anymore; it's been a while).

10. Now start recording another macro, and give it a different keyboard shortcut.

11. Press Ctrl+DownArrow, then LeftArrow. This will move your cursor to the end of the current paragraph. (End might work in most cases, but in case a paragraph is longer than just one line, I'd do what I suggested just to be safe.)

12. Type {{field-off:day}}

13. Press Ctrl+DownArrow 7 times, then press RightArrow (this sets your cursor up to be in the right place to execute the first macro again; here you've got to pray that the person who set up the document you're doing this to was absolutely consistent in the number of paragraphs between each heading; this strategy won't work at all if they weren't).

14. Stop Recording

15. Now execute your first macro by pressing its shortcut key.

16. Type the next date.

17. Execute your second macro by pressing its shortcut key.

18. If you are at the end of the document, you're done, otherwise go back to step 15 and repeat steps 15-18 in a loop.

Actually, on second thought, you could combine both macros in to one, which would make the repetitive motion easier (just one keyboard shortcut to execute over and over). You'd need to start with the cursor at the end of the first heading line (having already manually inserted the text that goes at the start of that line, without recording it), and then Start Recording before you type {{field-off:day}}. Do steps 12 and 13. Then do steps 6 and 7, and then Stop recording. That's when you'd type the date in, and then press your macro shortcut key again, and so on. You can repeat this loop over and over until you see that there isn't another heading after the current one. You'll manually finish up that one by typing {{field-off:day}} at the end of the paragraph.

This method can be generalized to whatever kind of text you're working with, and whatever stuff you want to do repetitively to each line or paragraph or whatever. You just need a bit of ingenuity.