Word – Format text as code snippet in any word processor, like we do in Stackexchange sites

automationformattingmicrosoft word

Its been more than six months since I'm using stackexchange, so everyone out there knows that we're speechless about how much it has been helpful to us. But a small thing about the these sites that I'm in love with is that the way we can format our questions, I'm pointing particularly to the way we format code snippets, i.e. either keeping them in single quotes (I don't know if they're actually called quotes or something else) LikeThis.Code() or by prefixing four spaces.

I need to write most of my college work in Microsoft Word or OneNote, where I have large chunk of code to be placed, I like my writing organized, like everyone do, so I format those code snippets with mono fonts manually. But after coming to stack… sites, I was wondering if I can automate similar behaviour in Word through some third party program, like AutoHotkey or something else. While I know AutoHotkey deals a lot with keyboard, but I was looking for a more fast and efficient way to format block of words into mono fonts (its ok, I'm not expecting them to hightlight syntax). Before a few months, I read an article on HowToGeek about an application that automatically replaces short-forms of words that we often type to the full word, basically converting informal English to formal (I can't remember now what was that application). So with the same way, can I format text in mono fonts, using single quotes or something else? so that I don't have to manually select text and change fonts to mono.

Best Answer

Create a new style that formats the text the way you want. The style will likely need to include:

setting the font to a monospaced font like Courier New
setting the language to No Proofing (Word 2003 and older) or Do Not Check Spelling or Grammar (Word 2007 and newer)
setting the font size to something smaller; often code won't fit well on a page unless you make it smaller

To use this, select the text and change the style. All the formatting attributes will be applied at once.

Save the style in the normal.dot template (the default) so that it's available in all documents.

If you need to do this often, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to the text so you don't have to select the style from the style menu. You don't need a separate program to do this. In Word 2007

Click the Office button.
Click the Word Options button (at the bottom of the menu)
Select Customize from the menu on the left.
Click the Keyboard Shortcuts: Customize button at the bottom.
In the Categories list, scroll down until you find Styles (second from the bottom) and select it.
In the Styles list, select the style you created.
Click in the Press New Shortcut key box.
Type the key combination you wish to use (e.g. Alt 1)
Click the Assign button
Click Close

When you close Word it may ask if you want to save the normal template. Answer Yes.

Related Solutions

Word – Are there any plugins for Microsoft Word to format source code samples inside a regular document

You can create a "code style" using the Format / Styles and Formatting option. From the "Styles and Formatting" sidebar, create a new style to use for code. You can specify the font, size, tabs, borders, shading, shortcut keys, etc...

Once you have a new code style, select your code in the document and apply your new style. You can select multiple locations in text by holding the button while selecting the text.

Another advantage of using styles is that you can easily change the format of any text that uses that style. You just change the properties of the style, and any text that uses that style is automatically updated.

Excel – How to set Excel to always import all columns of CSV files as Text

This works:

Sub OpenCsvAsText(ByVal strFilepath As String)

    Dim intFileNo As Integer
    Dim iCol As Long
    Dim nCol As Long
    Dim strLine As String
    Dim varColumnFormat As Variant
    Dim varTemp As Variant

    '// Read first line of file to figure out how many columns there are
    intFileNo = FreeFile()
    Open strFilepath For Input As #intFileNo
    Line Input #intFileNo, strLine
    Close #intFileNo
    varTemp = Split(strLine, ",")
    nCol = UBound(varTemp) + 1

    '// Prepare description of column format
    ReDim varColumnFormat(0 To nCol - 1)
    For iCol = 1 To nCol
        varColumnFormat(iCol - 1) = Array(iCol, xlTextFormat)
        ' What's this? See VBA help for OpenText method (FieldInfo argument).
    Next iCol

    '// Open the file using the specified column formats
    Workbooks.OpenText _
            Filename:=strFilepath, _
            DataType:=xlDelimited, _
            ConsecutiveDelimiter:=False, Comma:=True, _
            FieldInfo:=varColumnFormat

End Sub

Usage:

OpenCsvAsText "C:\MyDir\MyFile.txt"

Comma-separated file is now open as Excel sheet with all columns formatted as text.

Note that @Wetmelon's wizard solution works just fine, but if you're opening many files then you may, like me, grow weary of, each time, scrolling to column 60 in order to Shift-Click it.

EDIT @GSerg states in the comment below that this "doesn't work" and "eats spaces and leading zeroes". I'll just quote the comment to the question, which is more descriptive:

For reasons unknown, even if you explicitly provide formats for all columns in VBA, Excel will ignore it if the file extension is CSV. As soon as you change the extension, that same code will yield the correct results.

So the code above "works", but gets killed by this ridiculous Excel behaviour. Whichever way you cut it, you're stuck having to change the extension to something other than ".csv", sorry! After that, you're home free.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Word – Are there any plugins for Microsoft Word to format source code samples inside a regular document

Excel – How to set Excel to always import all columns of CSV files as Text

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