Quote:
Originally Posted by parisfranco
te second part of document has also 9 variations based on Date of birth
and then same text for several pages for all 9 variations
But here is the trick...I want to color different chunks of text based on their
sun sign for example
if he is aries the aries text would be colored in red
if he is aquarius aquarius text would be colored in red
etc
so I would like to have a form where I select his sign so it automatically gets colored
can this be done? I want to automate as much as possible...so coloring the text and rechecking manually takes a lot of time
|
Yeah, I really think learning macros/VBA will be the most helpful. You basically write a script that would apply various actions.
I think the first thing for you to do is make a kind of flow chart. Do you want to create nine different templates corresponding to your birth date factor, or twelve templates corresponding to each zodiac sign? Or one master template from which you then have to remove or modify all the parts that are not applicable? Break your document apart into segments. Maybe each document has a section 1 through 10, but if your subject is in Category 1 by birth date number, he gets Section 4 type A. If he's a Pisces, the tenth paragraph in Section 7 is red, but if he's Cancer, it's the 11th paragraph.
You could either write a script that would actively change the color of the text in one document, or it would grab the prepared highlighted Pisces version of that text and insert it. The latter is where the AutoText/Building Blocks feature that Mr. Kenyon has mentioned comes in. I guess you can save large chunks of text as building blocks; I tend to use it for mostly single paragraphs, or text boxes, or graphics. If you haven't used building blocks, there are some decent YouTube videos found by searching "Word Building Blocks", and this one is using Word 2016 specifically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2__Oh8stI-o
Whichever method you determine best to put it all together, all of this will be helped by having a thorough knowledge of Styles in Word. If you already use Styles, so much the better. When my job changed and I started using Word much more for editing long, annotated documents, I ended up taking some of the Word courses on LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com), which are free with the first month's trial. It was a good refresher, and I learned a lot. The classes with Gini Von Courter were particularly good.
Best,
Ann