Template:VBAexplained
This is one of the most viewed pages on my wiki. I have no idea why, but since it is so popular I will try and explain what it's about. Pretty much all of the functions enable me to work with both html and Mediawiki in my favoured environment, namely Microsoft word. What, you hate Microsoft word? Sure, it's not brilliant, but I know how it works, everyone uses it, and it is programmable. I have been using it a long time, and before that I used to have an old portable Remington (picture).
Some of the functions set hot keys to commonly used formatting functions like bold, italic, add anchor, add link and so on. You can set a global variable so that the same hot key does the same thing in html, in mediawiki or bulletin board format. Hot keys? Yes, I'm from the manual era where you didn't have stuff like a mouse, and you did everything using the keys. This is much quicker, in fact. I italicised mouse in about half a second using ctrl-shift-I, which is about a quarter of the time it takes to move my right hand to the mouse, move the mouse to the italic bit on the toolbar, then click, then move my hand back. No contest.
Other functions translate from one format to another. As you will have noticed, if you have looked at almost any other page in the Museum apart from this one, it makes heavy use of tables. These are pretty easy in Word, but difficult in html, and an absolute nightmare in Mediawiki. The 'table to wiki' and 'table to html' functions takes the difficulty out of this. It's also possible (though slightly messy) to convert back. Other functions make the work of digitising printed material a bit easier, for example by correcting common OCR errors (typically confusing an 'e' with a 'c' or vice versa), by removing excess carriage returns, converting non-tabular text into a table and vice versa.
To install the code, just place it in the Normal template of Word, and you are ready to go.
That's about it. With every kind wish,
Ed
