Agenda Wizard

[Ramblingman]

I installed a new hard disk in my Mac some months ago. When I
clean-installed MacOS X and Office v.X: Mac, I thought I installed
everything. I just discovered one thing is missing: the Agenda Wizard.

I use the Agenda Wizard to create meeting agendas with attached forms
for taking meeting minutes for the meeting secretary. I forgot that I
downloaded the Wizard from Mactopia to begin with. I went to Mactopia
and it isn't available for download anymore. And Microsoft's main
Office web-site downloads don't show up in the Office Project Gallery
when I dragged them into the right folders. Also: Microsoft's Office
web-site won't allow Safari to access certain downloads.

Is there any way to make this work?

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Whatever your name is:

Just hook the one from the main Microsoft download site. It works fine if
you do it in Safari.

You need to go here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT061995981033.aspx

Click Download Now, then just persist, ignoring all the warnings. This one
is marked "Word 2000" or later. For the most part, Word 2000 files work
just fine in Mac Word. Anything later than Word 2000 may not, but Word 2000
templates are usually fine.

You WILL need a copy of Stuffit to open the .CAB file that arrives. Stuffit
will hand you a .wiz file. .wiz is not an extension that Word Mac
recognises, but it's simply a Template file.

Change the .wiz extension to .dot, then open the file in Word. Do Save As
and save as Agenda Wizard.dot in your templates folder. You should see a
warning about Macros: that's fine, that's what a Wizard IS

After that, you will find it appears in your My Templates collection: if you
do a File>New from... The Agenda Wizard will start automatically and run.

Cheers

I installed a new hard disk in my Mac some months ago. When I
clean-installed MacOS X and Office v.X: Mac, I thought I installed
everything. I just discovered one thing is missing: the Agenda Wizard.

I use the Agenda Wizard to create meeting agendas with attached forms
for taking meeting minutes for the meeting secretary. I forgot that I
downloaded the Wizard from Mactopia to begin with. I went to Mactopia
and it isn't available for download anymore. And Microsoft's main
Office web-site downloads don't show up in the Office Project Gallery
when I dragged them into the right folders. Also: Microsoft's Office
web-site won't allow Safari to access certain downloads.

Is there any way to make this work?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

wiz is not an extension that Word Mac
recognises, but it's simply a Template file.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the info (and for whatever led you to
discover this!)

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Oh, my... That's one of those things that I thought "everybody knew".

Damn! I'll see if I can persuade Beth to put it on the Word site.

Yeah, a Microsoft Word Wizard is simply a VBA macro. The .wiz extension
didn't really catch on, I don't think: I am not sure whether they're still
using it.

A .CAB file is a Microsoft versions of a Zip file. It has higher
compression and longer internal path names. The Stuffit Expander can get
them open, the Mac Zip utility can't, last time I looked.

The term "Wizard" supposedly describes an application that puts up a user
form which steps the user through a decision tree of choices on the way to
configuring a result. Unfortunately, they have digitally-signed the code in
that one, which means we can't get it open in Mac Word to steal their code.
If anyone wants it, I'll see if I can saw it open on the PC

Of course, the wise people in here will realise that not "all" Wizards are
made for Microsoft Word, and the ones that are NOT designed for Word may
include bits of PC active content that definitely won't run on a Mac.

Given that we're all consenting adults in here, I can tell you that it is
usually fine to grab ANY kind of Microsoft template from the Microsoft
Office PC downloads site. The vast majority will work unchanged in Mac
Office 2004. Obviously things like Visio templates won't work, and some
bits of the VBA will error. But most of the templates offered there have no
VBA in them, and even if they do, and even if it won't run on a Mac, the
content part will work just fine.

After our whinging here when Word X came out, Mac BU and the Microsoft
Office Word PC Team forced the Microsoft Office Word download site to
include a test for Mac browsers, and that error page that appears if you go
in to the site from Safari or FireFox. The whole purpose of the error page
is simply to explain to Mac Users how to go about getting the content anyway


If you go in from a PC, the site is fully automatic if you have a licensed
version of Office -- it automatically installs the wizards in the correct
folder. On The Mac, we have to do that bit ourselves; but that's not too
hard because a Save As out of Word 2004 will only put a template in one
place

It is, however, important to do a Save As and not a re-name to get the file
into My Templates, because Word 2004 won't use the result if it doesn't have
the correct Mac Type and Creator codes correctly in the file.

Cheers

I didn't know that. Thanks for the info (and for whatever led you to
discover this!)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi John,

Just write this up for the site and I'll post it in a second!

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/WordMacHome.html>
My Site: <http://www.bethrosengard.com>

 

[Ramblingman]

Hi Whatever your name is:

Just hook the one from the main Microsoft download site. It works fine if
you do it in Safari.

You need to go here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT061995981033.aspx

Click Download Now, then just persist, ignoring all the warnings. This one
is marked "Word 2000" or later. For the most part, Word 2000 files work
just fine in Mac Word. Anything later than Word 2000 may not, but Word 2000
templates are usually fine.

You WILL need a copy of Stuffit to open the .CAB file that arrives. Stuffit
will hand you a .wiz file. .wiz is not an extension that Word Mac
recognises, but it's simply a Template file.

Change the .wiz extension to .dot, then open the file in Word. Do Save As
and save as Agenda Wizard.dot in your templates folder. You should see a
warning about Macros: that's fine, that's what a Wizard IS

After that, you will find it appears in your My Templates collection: if you
do a File>New from... The Agenda Wizard will start automatically and run.

Cheers


John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

I followed the above instructions. The Agenda Wizard crashes
spontaneously and will not allow me to complete a project.

Back to the drawing board, I guess...

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Oh, what a pain. It's trying to call PrivateProfileString... That should
"work" on the Mac.

Hang about, I'll see if I can fix it...

I followed the above instructions. The Agenda Wizard crashes
spontaneously and will not allow me to complete a project.

Back to the drawing board, I guess...

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Here you go: Fixed. I have removed the digital signature so you can edit
the code to suit yourself.

Oh, sod it: it's too big for the newsgroup. Here, click this link to get it
from my server:
http://public.jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/Agenda Wizard.dot.sitx

The original coders have done a lovely job with this one: this is a
commercial-grade VBA application (many of the templates offered in Microsoft
Downloads are hacked together by Code Cowboys who would stand your hair on
end, but this one was put together by a professional...)

However, since they did not foresee cross-platform use, they did not
initialise the location of the settings file called by PrivateProfileString.

I have added a hash-if statement that does this. The code should now run on
both Windows and Mac and do the right thing in both.

It saves its settings in Users/<user name>/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
folder.

Cheers

I followed the above instructions. The Agenda Wizard crashes
spontaneously and will not allow me to complete a project.

Back to the drawing board, I guess...

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

It is, however, important to do a Save As and not a re-name to get the file
into My Templates, because Word 2004 won't use the result if it doesn't have
the correct Mac Type and Creator codes correctly in the file.

Thanks for all the tweaking of the file, and the info. But this (above)
should not be the case for Word 2004, although it would be for X and earlier
versions. Word 2004 doesn't require Mac File and Creator Type codes - just
the correct extension - in this case - .dot)

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Paul:

That's not an assertion I personally would be comfortable dying in a ditch
for in a public forum

I believe that the file type and creator code override the extension within
the application. The file extension is basically used by the operating
system, not by Word.

Which means that if you try this on an older version of Mac Word that does
not know about the latest PC Word Type and Creator codes, I wouldn't like to
predict what would happen.

This particular "wizard" creates two other files during its run: I wouldn't
like to bet the rent on what would happen if there were a mis-match. My
remark was more to CYA in the case of "any other templates" that the users
may download from the Microsoft Office Downloads.

I've been into the code of some of them: trust me, "error handling" is a
foreign concept

Cheers

Thanks for all the tweaking of the file, and the info. But this (above)
should not be the case for Word 2004, although it would be for X and earlier
versions. Word 2004 doesn't require Mac File and Creator Type codes - just
the correct extension - in this case - .dot)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Ramblingman]

Here you go: Fixed. I have removed the digital signature so you can edit
the code to suit yourself.

Thank you. I downloaded the file and it worked. No more crashing.

You wouldn't mind creating a new "agenda wizard" from scratch, would
you?

The Microsoft one is really quirky. It forces you to work in this
little window and it is very inflexible.

Thanks again,

The Ramblingman