Converting Word 2003 macros to Word 2010 (or 2007)

Normally, I write about things that make many people, including my boss, head explode.  But today, I want to talk about Macros, not the C++ Macros, but rather the down to earth macros that the hardworking paralegals, administrative assistants or secretaries might use.

Why? My sister-in-law, Kathy, was visiting this week, and just before she left to return to the lovely land of Seattle, she ask a question:

The law firm I work for upgraded to Word 2010 and I no longer have my macros that I used in the previous version of Office (which I think was Office 2003, but could have been Office XP), what happened to them?  Is it Office 2010 fault?

The answer is pretty simple: Usually when a system is upgraded a proposal is written between the IT consulting firm and the customer, especially if it is for a law firm.  Often, the “normal.dot” template is not part of the contract between the IT consulting firm and the law firm, or any firm for that matter.  However, the line workers, in this case the paralegals, often use recorded macros for efficiency purposes, but lawyers usually don’t use these macros.  After a number of years using Office XP, these paralegals build up a significant amount of macros that they are used to having.

When the new Office 2010 is put into place the normal.dot from Office XP or Office 2003 is not used to build the new normal.dotx.  Unfortunate since it is very easy to do, of course some macros will not translate because they may use features unique to Office 2003 or Office XP.  But most will.

Here is one way to do (make sure to test that everything works before committing to this as a consultant):

Change the name of the Office 2003 or XP to normal1.doc

Build Office 2010

Open Office 2010

On the ribbon, select View, Macros, View Macro, select or click the Organize button, then the dialog box below will show up:

image

In the box on the left select normal1.doc, select the macros you need to move to the new normal.

Close and that will do it, the macros will now be available for you to use in your documents.

So, you might ask, what about autocorrect?  Well I will describe how to move your autocorrect from an earlier version to a later version in a later blog post.

Finally, why hasn’t Microsoft clearly documented this procedure?  I have no idea, it appears to be an oversight that needs to be addressed by the Office team, frankly, I could not easily find the answer on office.com, so why should you?  And the user experience is that the end users blame Microsoft for the upgrades, etc. when the ease of fixing that dissatisfaction could easily be accomplished.

After all, Administrative assistance, secretaries, paralegals, etc. really make use of this kind of thing and they need to be taken care of as well.