Word help.....hiding text?

Pookie Bear · 7 Apr 2008 at 15:30

Hi,

Not sure if this is in the right place, but I'm looking for a little help.

I know Word to a fairly basic level (writing letters, creating tables, etc) but what I want is to have a page of information which, when a tickbox is clicked, or some kind of trigger is manually activated, further information is displayed.

So there is a paragraph of information, then when the trigger is activated, another paragraph appears.

Does anyone know of any such functionality?

Thanks!

MarcLister · 7 Apr 2008 at 15:42

You might be able to get this to happen using a macro and some VB script.

Might be more apt for programming forum if you do use a macro. Want me to request a don move this over for you?

Pookie Bear · 7 Apr 2008 at 16:03

MarcLister said:
You might be able to get this to happen using a macro and some VB script.

Might be more apt for programming forum if you do use a macro. Want me to request a don move this over for you?

I'd be happy to receive help from anyone, so if you could arrange for it to be moved, that would be appreciated.

I'd warn anyone who wants to help, however, that the limit of my programming ability extends to using my Commodore64 with:

10 Print "Luw was here."
20 Goto 10

MarcLister · 7 Apr 2008 at 16:04

I will make it so.

Always wanted to say that!

RobH · 7 Apr 2008 at 17:39

Can you be a bit more specific about what you want to do?

I've used VBA (Visual Basic for applications - this is what Office uses) for excel to do some spreadsheet functions so I might be able to have a go. I'll have to get hold of the API specification for Word, which version are you using as it does change between versions.

Pookie Bear · 7 Apr 2008 at 18:23

RobH said:
Can you be a bit more specific about what you want to do?

I've used VBA (Visual Basic for applications - this is what Office uses) for excel to do some spreadsheet functions so I might be able to have a go. I'll have to get hold of the API specification for Word, which version are you using as it does change between versions.

It's Word 2003.

Basically, I'm providing data in a Word document for a some users which comes in two types - basic information and advanced information. The second level of information is only for use when the first level doesn't provide the info required, so I'd rather it was kept under wraps until required (and to keep the mess to a minimum).

Hope that clarifies things a little?

RobH · 7 Apr 2008 at 18:38

So is there any way to identify the paragraphs that need to be hidden? Given a document, how would you know what needs to be hidden? From the point of view of VBA, all paragraphs in a document are indexed, however that is not to say that this must be the only way of identifying them, I'm not a big user of Word so I don't know if there is any meta data that you can add to a paragraph (such as a name or id) to make it unique. I am assuming there are multiple documents, you could hard code it to say hide paragraphs 1,3,5 for example but it may be more useful to make it dynamic so it is reusable.

Pookie Bear · 8 Apr 2008 at 10:29

Hmmm, I'm not entirely sure.

At the moment, we're busy putting all the data together, so it's colour coded, but this is just for our use during the creation process. That said, I'm not sure colour is a valid identifier.

It's worth bearing in mind that I'm a bit of a noob here....meta-data, is it like a hidden tag inside the paragraph (invisible to all except when in VBA) - I mean, I know what information needs to be hidden to start with - and if it all needs to be tagged, then so be it.

I agree with your comments about Word......so what if this was to be in HTML instead. Is that more viable? Either format should meet our requirements (if I ever know what they really are!).

RobH · 8 Apr 2008 at 10:57

Well HTML is a much better format for what you are trying to do and makes more sense, Word is really designed for static documents to be printed. If you did this in HTML you have many options that allow you to hide paragraphs such as CSS and Javascript and the code to do this is really basic so it shouldn't cause you any problems. I think that HTML offers you much better flexability and it is a presentation language and can be viewed by nearly anyone on any platform which is always a benefit.

Pookie Bear · 8 Apr 2008 at 12:58

That sounds a lot more reasonable.

How, in your opinion, would be the best way to find out how to do this for an HTML document? In all fairness, the people who will be viewing or using this couldn't care if I gave it to them on a Star Trek datapad as long as it was in English and didn't use any words with more than three syllables.