Normal dot with out mu macros

[Thejan Mendis]

Hi,

I have lost all my macros in my normal.dot mysteriously. but the file size
is still the same. dose anyone have idea?????????

THEJAN

 

[mksmith]

Not really, but the template that you sent me yesterday also had no code
in it either.

I guess that your machine did something odd and created a new normal.dot.
Now, as I have pointed out a thousand times on this newsgroup and on
various other sites and mailing lists; NEVER place code in normal.dot that
you are not prepared to lose.

Use normal.dot as a scratch working environment only and if you are
building code (please don't use the word 'macros' near me as I get shivers
up and down my spine!) which is used throughout the Word environment then
create a start-up template from the start.

- Malc
www.dragondrop.com

 

[Jezebel]

I guess that your machine did something odd and created a new normal.dot.
Now, as I have pointed out a thousand times on this newsgroup and on
various other sites and mailing lists; NEVER place code in normal.dot that
you are not prepared to lose.

What a strange and bizarre suggestion. The fact that you've pointed it out
before doesn't lend it any credibility. Obviously any file is prone to loss
and corruption; but normal.dot is no more prone to it than other files.

There are certainly good operational procedure for putting your macro code
elsewhere (shove your cold shivers up your bum, mate! 'macro' is the correct
word, whatever inane prejudices you might suffer from); but code protection
isn't one of them. Your assertion implies that code placed elsewhere than in
normal.dot is somehow safer -- which just isn't the case.

Use normal.dot as a scratch working environment only and if you are
building code (please don't use the word 'macros' near me as I get shivers
up and down my spine!) which is used throughout the Word environment then
create a start-up template from the start.

This suggestion is so silly one is inclined to suspect you of malice. (Are
you deliberately trying to confuse the newbies who use this site, or are you
just talking through your hat?) Because what you suggest is exactly the
opposite of good working practice for Word. Given that normal.dot is, by
definition, available everywhere and always to the Word application, it's
the very LAST place to be putting scratchpad code.

Presumably 'create a start-up template from the start' meant something to
you when you thought it ... pity it didn't translate into writing.

 

[mksmith]

Jezebel

Pull your claws in!

Just because normal.dot is available on every machine it doesn't mean that
one has to put code in it. How many times have I seen normal.dot get
corrupted on various clients' sites and compare that to the number of
times that I have seen a start-up template get corrupted?

In all the years that I have coded VBA for Word I have only once ever seen
a start-up template corrupted and that was at a large London law firm. I
have seen countless normal.dot templates break over the years.

Secondly, when I produce some code to do something which is global to the
whole of the Word environment I shove it in a self-containing start-up
template. This means that I can distribute the code to ten, a hundred or
a thousand users (which I have done for major clients) and it will work.

How do I go about distributing normal.dot templates to a thousand users
world-wide? It won't work; settings will get lost, autotext and the like
will be lost.

<<
Presumably 'create a start-up template from the start' meant some
thing to you when you thought it ... pity it didn't translate into writing
Ok, let's see. 'Create a start-up template' means just that; one creates
a template which contains code at Word start-up time and lives in the
start-up folder. There is nothing wrong with that part of the sentence
at all. '...from the start.' means from the start of coding/development.

I think that is rather clear.


<<
This suggestion is so silly one is inclined to suspect you of malice. (Are
you deliberately trying to confuse the newbies who use this site, or are
you just talking through your hat?)
Malice? Moi? Given the amount of help that I have given folk here and
on the Word mailing list and, indeed, directly I would say the total
opposite.



Honestly, you might think that I am some malicious, clueless and gormless
fool who knows sod-all about Word VBA development; but I can assure you
that nothing is further from the truth. If you look and listen to what I
write about code within normal.dot, magic forms, pointers and the like you
will understand that I write from experience and I am passing on some
strong 'best practice' information.

I have many visitors to my site who often write to me saying that, amongst
other, my tutorials on template construction are helpful. Indeed, I
understand that there is a link to that very set of pages from the MVP
site. Would the MVPs have put that there if I were 'talking through my
hat'?


Of course, you may choose to ignore what I say. Certainly my clients
don't and I have enough of those who are happy with me.

Regards
Malc
www.dragondrop.com

 

[Jezebel]

Just because normal.dot is available on every machine it doesn't mean that
one has to put code in it.

I didn't say one HAD to put code in it. You're asserting that there's reason
not to, which is simply not the case.

How many times have I seen normal.dot get

corrupted on various clients' sites and compare that to the number of
times that I have seen a start-up template get corrupted?

I don't know. How many trimes have you? Perhaps it's a quirk of your poor
coding; it's certainly not a common problem.

In all the years that I have coded VBA for Word I have only once ever seen
a start-up template corrupted and that was at a large London law firm. I
have seen countless normal.dot templates break over the years.

I think you exaggerate. Either that or your coding is incompetent (which
seems not unlikely, given the absurdity of the rest of your claims).

Secondly, when I produce some code to do something which is global to the
whole of the Word environment I shove it in a self-containing start-up
template. This means that I can distribute the code to ten, a hundred or
a thousand users (which I have done for major clients) and it will work.

How do I go about distributing normal.dot templates to a thousand users
world-wide? It won't work; settings will get lost, autotext and the like
will be lost.

As I said, there are good operational reasons for using add-ins and other
templates (distribution being one of them); but code corruption isn't one of
them.

<<
Presumably 'create a start-up template from the start' meant some
thing to you when you thought it ... pity it didn't translate into writing

Ok, let's see. 'Create a start-up template' means just that; one creates
a template which contains code at Word start-up time and lives in the
start-up folder. There is nothing wrong with that part of the sentence
at all. '...from the start.' means from the start of coding/development.

I think that is rather clear.

If you think that's clear, no wonder your coding has problems.

<<
This suggestion is so silly one is inclined to suspect you of malice. (Are
you deliberately trying to confuse the newbies who use this site, or are
you just talking through your hat?)

Malice? Moi? Given the amount of help that I have given folk here and
on the Word mailing list and, indeed, directly I would say the total
opposite.



Honestly, you might think that I am some malicious, clueless and gormless
fool who knows sod-all about Word VBA development; but I can assure you
that nothing is further from the truth.

No I just observe that you make a fatuous assertion about putting code in
normal.dot. You present it as 'best practice' (which it clearly isn't) and
claim a great depth of 'experience' in respect of it (which is either
dishonest).

If you look and listen to what I

write about code within normal.dot, magic forms, pointers and the like you
will understand that I write from experience and I am passing on some
strong 'best practice' information.

You seem to think you know a lot about Word. But if you think this counts as
best practice then no wonder your site is such a failure.

I have many visitors to my site who often write to me saying that, amongst
other, my tutorials on template construction are helpful. Indeed, I
understand that there is a link to that very set of pages from the MVP
site. Would the MVPs have put that there if I were 'talking through my
hat'?

I'm not commenting on your competence generally; just the idiocy of your
assertion about normal.dot.

Of course, you may choose to ignore what I say. Certainly my clients
don't and I have enough of those who are happy with me.

You fool no-one but yourself.

 

[Jonathan West]

What a strange and bizarre suggestion. The fact that you've pointed it out
before doesn't lend it any credibility. Obviously any file is prone to loss
and corruption; but normal.dot is no more prone to it than other files.

In principle, you are correct, but the fact is that normal.dot is more
vulnerable in practice, for these reasons

1. it is each user's repository of individual customisations, and is
modified fairly often as a result.

2. It is the storage point for some special functions within Word which seem
to make it more vulnerable to corruption.

There are certainly good operational procedure for putting your macro code
elsewhere (shove your cold shivers up your bum, mate! 'macro' is the correct
word, whatever inane prejudices you might suffer from); but code protection
isn't one of them. Your assertion implies that code placed elsewhere than in
normal.dot is somehow safer -- which just isn't the case.

If you develop code for yourself, and always start by placing it in
normal.dot, then normal.dot is progressively going to suffer from template
bloat - which increases its vulnerability to corruption. More recent
versions of Word appear to slow the rate at which bloat increases, but I
don't think it has been eliminated. There are ways of shrinking bloated
templates (effectively by exporting and re-importing all the modules) but by
& large, if you place code in normal.dot, it should be on the understanding
that you might lose it if the template corrupts.

While it is reasonable for convenience to put odd bits of throwaway code
into normal.dot - i.e. routines that you create for a specific purpose and
aren't likely to use again, if you start work on a more substantial piece of
code, my advice would be to put it in its own template right from the start.

This suggestion is so silly one is inclined to suspect you of malice. (Are
you deliberately trying to confuse the newbies who use this site, or are you
just talking through your hat?) Because what you suggest is exactly the
opposite of good working practice for Word. Given that normal.dot is, by
definition, available everywhere and always to the Word application, it's
the very LAST place to be putting scratchpad code.

It is where recorded macros are places by default. It is where new macros
are created by default. By any reasonable definition, that is a scratchpad
in this context.

Presumably 'create a start-up template from the start' meant something to
you when you thought it ... pity it didn't translate into writing.

He meant put the code into an addin which is stored in Word's startuup
folder, so that it is automatically loaded when Word is started giving the
user access to all the macros therein.

--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
MultiLinker - Automated generation of hyperlinks in Word
Conversion to PDF & HTML
http://www.multilinker.com

 

[JGM]

Lke Malc said, woh, pull your claws in, Jezebel!

You aggressive language is not welcomed on a peer to peer newsgroup. While
you have every right in the world to disagree with Malc, you have absolutely
no rights whatsoever to use such language. It is is unacceptable and
downright rude.

I have been following various threads in this VBA groups for just under a
year, I can affirm that 95% of the time, Malc's advice is not only sounds,
but very useful. Of course, once in a while he will suggest one way of
dealing with a problem and some else will a come up with a more efficient
way of dealing with the same situatation. But that is the nature of the VBA
beast, and expected in such a forum, different people have different
experiences and strengths.

Now, I am sure hundreds of other experienced VBA programmers will agree, you
never put serious code in Normal.dot. You seem to disagree witht he fact
that the Normal.dot can get corrupted. It does. Maybe it hasn't happened to
you, but trust us, when hundreds of people throught out the threads of this,
and other Word related newsgroups, say that it does, well... why would we be
lying? And just as Malc says, I have seen so many Normal.dot tremplate get
corrupted on my client's machines, but never did the global template I have
provided get corrupted.

Just do a search in the newsgroups through Google with "Normal.dot" and
"corruption" as keywords... Since you are so eager at attacking a fellow
helper in the peer to peer network, it must be that you have lots of
experience... but if you have lots of experience, how can you ignore such a
basic fact as Normal.dot corruption? You are the first person I have ever
seen in these newsgroups that claims that Normal.dot does not get corrupted,
and that if it does, it is because the user is a moron of some sort... How
is that possible? ALL the people that have experience Normal.dot corruption
are morons? I don't think so!

Have a good day.

 

[Jim Satterfield]

Sorry, Jezebel, but I think they have the right of it. When users come
running to me with strange things that Word is doing to them there are more
than a few times that it turned out that the normal.dot file that their
document was based on had been corrupted. These were simple files, too. No
code added to them. I have no idea why that file can be messed up more than
other ones but it's certainly a behavior that I've seen too.


Jim

 

[mksmith]

What exactly, as our American cousins would put it, is your beef? What
has brought on this incredibly hostile attitude?

Note that I didn't say that the code would get corrupted but the
normal.dot template itself could be corrupted. I didn't say that it was a
common problem but the weight of numbers of instances of 'my'
installations of VBA and others' which have had normal.dot corruption
compared to actual start-up template corruption is, by ratio,
overwhelming.

In fact I have seen normal.dot go belly up on sites which have had no
add-ins, templates or whatever installed. Go on, blame me for that.


What's wrong with my code; why do you think that it is incompetent and why
is my site 'a failure'? I am amazed at this statement; if one person ever
visits my site and learns something from it then I would say that its
purpose was achieved.


I'm curious; have I managed to offend you in some strange way which
warrants this absurd personal attack? No, please don't bother to answer
this question; I'm not on here to massage my ego, to have a fight but to
offer help and assistance where it may be required.

Of course, if you choose to disagree with anything that I write then,
please do so, and if you wish to debate anything then I will be more than
happy to do so as there is no way that I can claim to know everything and,
who knows, a sensible discussion without the insults may well be
productive to all.

Regards
Malc
www.dragondrop.com

 

[mksmith]

Jezebel

I'm not sure what the heck kicked all this off and in all honesty I don't
care.

I just suggest that whatever issue we have we drop it and bury the hatchet
(but not in each other!).

Regards
Malc
www.dragondrop.com

 

[Lars-Eric Gisslén]

Malc,

building code (please don't use the word 'macros' near me as I get shivers
up and down my spine!)

What do you have against the word 'macro'? Macro is the oppsite of Micro,
it's something big. There are a few programming languages that has macro
compilers build in to the runtime (you can build string expressions during
runtime and have them compiled and executed). Very powerful. Then you also
have Macro Assembler (which is defenately nothing for beginners).

Regards,
Lars-Eric

 

[mksmith]

Hej Lars-Eric

My tongue was firmly jammed in my cheek there!

Hilsen
Malc
www.dragondrop.com

 

[Jezebel]

Along with your foot?

 

[Jezebel]

Jezebel

I'm not sure what the heck kicked all this off and in all honesty I don't
care.

I just suggest that whatever issue we have we drop it and bury the hatchet
(but not in each other!).

Sure, as long as you stop pestering the group with stupidly misleading
responses.

 

[Lars-Eric Gisslén]

Malc,

Where have you learned Swedish?

Hälsningar,
Lars-Eric

 

[mksmith]

Oh, come on now!

We've both, as well as others, have lots to offer here, so let's have done
with it. The good burghers of this newsgroup don't want to see this
petty sniping. So, even though you may disagree with me from time to
time there is no reason to continue with this nonsense.

What do you want me to say? That you are the most bestest and uber-est
VBA wallah to walk this earth? If that's what you wish then I will.

But this constant rot about the apparent failures of my site, my inability
to code and the rest doesn't belong here and, really, it doesn't wash.

Best wishes
Malc
www.dragondrop.com

 

[mksmith]

Lived in Oslo for a good number of years and played rugby in the Swedish
league. For Oslo, that is, which made for some very interesting, long but
memorable trips.

Veldig bra tiden.

Med venlig hilsen
Malc

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "Jezebel" <[email protected]>,

Jez, it is you, not Malc, that should be keeping your silly ideas off
list. Why does Normal.dot suffer corruption problems more so than any
other document? Please Jez, think for just one sec. ITS ALWAYS OPEN
AND ALWAYS THE DEFAULT CUSTOMIZATION CONTEXT

Any changes at all will always want to fiddle into normal. Thus it
regularly blows up. Additionally, as www.mvps.org or any other good
source of word info will suggest, there are regular occasions where
we recommend renaming normal.dot, which with poor process users will
invariably lead to missing stuff.

It is not only Mal that has pointed it out before, but many others. I
haven't made any particular effort to chastise you for your posts, if
you want to keep slamming my buddies in your ignoramus fashion then
rest assured I will delight in giving you a very public display of
manners.

Normal is bad. Avoid it kids.

What a strange and bizarre suggestion. The fact that you've pointed it out
before doesn't lend it any credibility. Obviously any file is prone to loss
and corruption; but normal.dot is no more prone to it than other files.

There are certainly good operational procedure for putting your macro code
elsewhere (shove your cold shivers up your bum, mate! 'macro' is the correct
word, whatever inane prejudices you might suffer from); but code protection
isn't one of them. Your assertion implies that code placed elsewhere than in
normal.dot is somehow safer -- which just isn't the case.



This suggestion is so silly one is inclined to suspect you of malice. (Are
you deliberately trying to confuse the newbies who use this site, or are you
just talking through your hat?) Because what you suggest is exactly the
opposite of good working practice for Word. Given that normal.dot is, by
definition, available everywhere and always to the Word application, it's
the very LAST place to be putting scratchpad code.

Presumably 'create a start-up template from the start' meant something to
you when you thought it ... pity it didn't translate into writing.

Steve Hudson

Word Heretic, Sydney, Australia
Tricky stuff with Word or words for you.
Email (e-mail address removed)
Products http://www.geocities.com/word_heretic/products.html

Replies offlist may require payment.

 

[Lars-Eric Gisslén]

Malc,

Rugby?? I was not even aware of a Rugby league here. Well, I hope the old
Vikings up here was not as hard on you as for about 1000 years ago

Hälsningar,
Lars-Eric

 

[Jezebel]

What a lot of pompous crap. As you admit, you're just parrotting anecdotes
from others, without actually thinking about the significance of what you
say. Yes normal is usually open (not quite always), and it's the default for
a heap of things; but 'regularly blows up'? Only if you have a *very*
charitable interpretation of 'regular'.