Publisher 2003 should improve on macros and addins soon!

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Bram van Driel - 13 Dec 2005 10:43 GMT

Hello,

I am a frequent user of Office and am currently very impressed with MS
Publisher. Currently as an IT consultant I am advising many businesses to
stop using word and switch to publisher for everything but letters. In order
to make the transition easier I devolop macros that help people to create
great documents with little efford.

For all Office applications it is possible to create addins from macros and
have them assigned to a toolbar. This greatly improves functionallity and
removes the need for users to understand how to start macros. For publisher a
few things are not possible yet:
1. To record a macro
2. To add a macro to a toolbar
3. To create an addin and add it to a toolbar

I can live with the first; msdn works fine for me. But the second and third
shortcoming highly limit my clients in using Publisher in an intuitive
manner. Could you please add the second and third feature soon and add it to
an update or SP3?

Thanks,

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Ed Bennett - 13 Dec 2005 13:04 GMT

> For all Office applications it is possible to create addins from
> macros and have them assigned to a toolbar. This greatly improves
> functionallity and removes the need for users to understand how to
> start macros. For publisher a few things are not possible yet:
> 1. To record a macro

This is most definitely wanted, and the Publisher MVPs have been requesting
this since macro functionality was first introduced in Publisher 2002.

> 2. To add a macro to a toolbar

This is possible at the moment by adding some additional code. Try
searching the archives of this newsgroup.

> 3. To create an addin and add it to a toolbar

This is not currently possible due to a fundamental difference between the
other applications' VBA functionality and Publisher's. In Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint, you can have macro/add-in templates that load on top of the
normal document template, adding the macro functionality. AFAIK (although I
have not used this functionality), creating an add-in from a macro in these
applications would simply transfer the code into an auto-load template. In
Publisher, the only way to get macro code into a publication is either to
use a custom document template with the code in (the normal document
template normal.pub can contain macros, but they do not transfer into a
publication based on it - only styles are transferred) or to use a full
add-in. The only add-ins supported in Publisher are DLL-file based.
Thus for Publisher to create an add-in (or add-in-like macro-feature) from a
macro, it would either have to somehow (not sure of what the specifics would
entail) compile the VBA project to a DLL file, complete with interfaces that
are not visible in the VBA environment (they might be there, I'm not sure),
or it would have to completely rewrite the new document code to allow use of
macros in normal.pub.

You can always, however, create an add-in using COM in the language of your
choice (e.g. VB, VC++, VJ++, VB .NET, C#, J#, Delphi, or even Visual COBOL).

> I can live with the first; msdn works fine for me. But the second and
> third shortcoming highly limit my clients in using Publisher in an
> intuitive manner. Could you please add the second and third feature
> soon and add it to an update or SP3?

Service packs may introduce small new features if they require little coding
and are unlikely to introduce bugs (as service packs are not beta tested by
as large a group as main Office releases). To introduce features 1 and 3
would require a massive amount of coding, and would be very likely to
introduce bugs, so I would bet very good money on never seeing these
features in a service pack. Feature number 2 would be more possible, but I
think to introduce this feature in a user-friendly manner would require more
coding than the Publisher team would be able to do for SP3. Publisher 12 is
already in beta testing; by the time a product enters beta testing it is
normally too late for such large-scale changes to be added to the product.

Sorry to disappoint.

Signature

Ed Bennett - MVP Microsoft Publisher

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Bram van Driel - 13 Dec 2005 14:01 GMT

Too bad you can't fix al my problems with a single service pack release..! ;-)

> > 2. To add a macro to a toolbar
>
> This is possible at the moment by adding some additional code. Try
> searching the archives of this newsgroup.

Thanks for the advice. The solution you gave before works fine; for all
people wondering where to find it, look for the topic "How do I add a button
to a toolbar...", page 4/5 of this forum.

> You can always, however, create an add-in using COM in the language of your
> choice (e.g. VB, VC++, VJ++, VB .NET, C#, J#, Delphi, or even Visual COBOL).

Guess creating a COM from VBA is not possible in Publisher as described in
the link below?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/modcore/html/de
wlkwalkthroughcreatingcomadd-in.asp

Anyway, thanks for the advice again, keep up the good work,

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