Macro Newbie, help please

Dave013 · General User Joined: 18 Apr 2012 Posts: 7

I am looking to be able to type in a person's name and have it appear at set points throughout a preset document.

I am also looking to be able to insert a person's sex in one spot and have it adjust pronouns (his, her, he, she, etc) throughout a present document.

I tried searching for this, but got way too many results to wade through.

Thanks for any help.

JohnV · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 1:45 pm Post subject:

You don't need macros for either.

Insert > Fields > Other > Variables tab. Select User Field and Format as Text, name it and click the green check mark. Now select Input Field, in the Reference box put a prompt like, "Enter your name." and click insert. Don't fill in a value unless you want a default one.

You only want one Input Field for any defined variable so select User Field again and move the the next location in your document where you want this variable to appear and click Insert.

Go to the first location where he/she will occur. Overwrite the name of your current User Field with Sex and repeat the steps above. This time you will want to enter a default he or she. Move to the first occurrence of him/her. Click on the Function tab and select Conditional Text. The Condition is
Sex EQ "he"
no quotes are need in the Then and Else boxes. Repeat for his/her, his/hers and etc.

Save your document as a template. When you create a new document from this template (do not open from Recent Documents) you will be prompted for the variable values.

Dave013 · General User Joined: 18 Apr 2012 Posts: 7

Thanks so much.

1. If the same pronoun appears at the start of sentences at times and is not at the start at other times is there a way to get it auto capitalized or do I have to do separate fields for each case?

2. Also, is there a way to save the same variables for different documents so that I don't have to start from scratch each time?

3. Another also...this worked great for my first document and then I followed the same steps exactly (I'm fairly certain) and it all works but in the second document I am not getting the automatic prompts like I did in the first one. I have to click on the first instance of name, sex and enter values that way -- what did I do wrong?

JohnV · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 5:19 pm Post subject:

Dave013 · General User Joined: 18 Apr 2012 Posts: 7

Dave013 · General User Joined: 18 Apr 2012 Posts: 7

I think I figured it out. I was inserting the wrong type of fields. Thanks for all of your help.