Video Demonstration of Macro Recording

Just to clarify my last post, I've recorded a video of the macro recording process.



Because of the quality constraints of internet video, it may be a little better to click through to YouTube and watch full screen.
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Using Microsoft Office Macros

This post is an introduction to using macros in Office applications. Check Bill's recent post to enable macros. Bill has hinted a little bit at the power of Office automation and I wanted to jump in quick and get some initial explanations out of the way.
I'm going to do something we can build on later, a macro that finds and replaces paragraphs with a space so that all the text ends up in one line (this will be handy for cleaning up messy pastes from Acrobat - see the description of the problem here).

First lets start recording a macro. In Word 2007, go to Developer -> Record Macro . After hitting the Record Macro button, Word will ask you to name the macro, just pick something descriptive like "replace paragraphs." After hitting OK Word will be in record mode and your cursor will have a record symbol .




Next we do the actions in Word that we want to repeat with our macro. In this case, we are going to find and replace paragraphs with spaces. Go to the Find and Replace dialog (Home->Replace in Word 2007 or Ctrl+H). We need the advance options to replace paragraphs. Hit the More button in the lower left of the dialog box. Once the advanced options are visible, hit the Special button and select paragraph mark. The Find what box will show a "^p" to symbolize that it will find paragraphs. Now, put a " " (space) in the Replace with box. Now hit the Replace All button. Whether or not anything was replaced doesn't matter, we are saving this for the future. Now hit the Developer ->Stop Recording button. You've just created your first macro.

You can go to the Visual Basic editor to see the code generated (Developer -> Visual Basic or Alt+F11). The code looks like this (don't get intimidated, we will explain later).

Sub Macro1()
'
' Macro1 Macro
'
'
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "^p"
.Replacement.Text = " "
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

Now, lets test the new macro. Type some text into Word in different paragraphs (type text, hit enter, type some more, repeat). Then run the macro. Go to Developer ->Macros (or hit Alt+F8). The macro window will pop up, pick yours from the list and hit run.


Viola! This:

Turns into this:


In a future post, Bill will show how to assign a keyboard shortcut to our new macro.
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Using Google Notebook to do Case Research

When I'm doing case research for a brief or memo I usually compile a file full of citations and quotes and add a few notes that I can come back to later to arrange into a coherent form. Google has taken a few steps out of this process with Google Notebook.

Google Notebook adds a plug-in to your browser. The plug-in gives you a Open Notebook button in the lower right of your screen and a Note this (Google Notebook) menu item when you right click highlighted text. To add something to you notebook you highlight the relevant text, right click, and select Note this. A small Google Notebook window will open in the bottom right of your browser with you text in a new notebook entry. The title of the entry will be a link to the webpage you copied the text from. You can create new notebooks for each research topic.

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Fax Without A Machine

This is a quick post about a technology/ service that I've found indispensible while I was working (far far) away from the office. Email fax is something every attorney should check out. The service I've used is called eFax but I've also looked into a few others. With email fax you are assigned a phone number which dials into the service's fax machine bank. The service then receives the document in digital form and sends it to your email.

eFax provides its basic services for free but the file you are sent is in their proprietary format that needs their reader to open (with some of the tools we have mentioned on this blog you can figure out how to convert to PDF). Another down side of the free service is that you are issued a long distance phone number. The paid service gets you PDF files in your email and a local fax number. eFax will also let you send an electronic document to someone's fax machine and, of course, this is limited in the free version. Check out their product overview.

I've also poked around on the eFax developer site and it appears that if your firm really wanted to get into it, eFax can scan barcodes on faxes so they can be routed sorted etc.

Finally, the last cool thing I've used eFax for is as a ghetto feed scanner. You put your pleading or whatever in the fax machine, hit go, and then check your e-mail for your PDF version.

[Edit: eFax also has an extension for OpenOffice.org which allows you to create a document and send a fax without ever leaving your word processing screen. -- Bill]

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Word VBA UserForms Part 1: Intro

In light of Mike's recent post on template's I'll stick to the theme and get into UserForms. This will be the first post in a series of 4 showing you how to create a UserForm template.

Everyone knows that there's repetition in some of the more mundane details of the law. These highly repetitive documents are where you want to look to shave minutes off of preparation; While templates are good for ensuring consistency and beginning to trim time off your document preparation, UserForms are where you can really knock off a substantial amount of time.

During my summer internship I was able to (almost) completely streamline the new public defender client intake process using UserForms, bringing my new client intake time from close to 40 minutes down to something like 15-20 minutes (YMMV). The purpose of my doing this was as much trepidation of missing a step (you know... like forgetting to send the States Attorney a discovery request), as it was striving for efficiency. Regardless of the motivation, the end result was a ton of time saved in the process and the peace of mind of knowing that I wasn't skipping steps anymore.

[ShubE]I just want to add to Bill's intro here. If you are going into corporate law this is HUGE. Securities filings, PPMs, etc. all are huge repetitive documents. Big problems can be caused by missing something with your find and replace. It is far safer to create an automated document once and put a lot of time into making sure its right than to try to push something out at the last minute with a find and replace technique. We had a nightmare with this the summer I worked for a corporate attorney.[/Shube]

In using UserForms we're going to get into what's likely going to be some pretty intimidating stuff to many. If you've not used VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) before you're not alone. I had not previously done anything remotely related to this before undertaking this project, I was intimidated too. All you need is a desire to save some time and an easy to understand tutorial, that's where I come in.

The First thing we need to do is understand what UserForms do... I can sit here and tell you that it saves time, but you need to see for yourself. The people at FontStuff.com have created this sample document, in the form of a interview invitation, (click to download). Download and open it and we'll take a look at the possibilities.

Enabling Macros
If you're working with the default Word settings you likely see a message that looks like the one below and a letter with a bunch of blanks in it.No biggie... Here's what we do.
1. Click Options on the banner.
2. This dialog box will display... As is shown, select "Enable this content" and then click OK.

3. The page will automatically refresh displaying the following form box.


Populating the Letter
1. Fill in the form with whatever you'd like... Play Mad-Libs.
2. Click OK. (man, these are really easy instructions).

Now take a look at the finished letter. All of the data that you entered will have been populated into the letter at their designated locations. This is a good start to the possibilities, but not a true representation of all the benefits these forms can bring to a law office. In the letter we've just created each form field is only placed into the letter one time, but Userforms are capable of doing more. Imagine a divorce document where the parties names will be put in 3 or 4 different places, you'd only have to enter the names one time on the form and they would be placed in each of the locations in the document that you designate.

That does it for Part 1 of UserForms. Stay tuned for Parts 2 (preparing the document), 3 (creating the form), and 4 (gasp, the code).
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Making Templates of Commonly Used Documents

The practice of law involves a good deal of repetition in documents. One attorney I've worked for gave me a memorable quote as I was scanning and OCRing several of our client's competitor's franchise agreements: "It won't help you in law school, but plagiarism is an asset to the practice of law." Another way to take advantage of the repetition in the legal field is with document automation technologies. Bill is slated to get to the real good stuff, but in the meantime I can talk about document templates.

Step 1: Creating the template content

The idea behind a document template is that you can create a foundation document that has all the necessary information in it except that information that is specific to a use. A template leaves use specific information as "blanks" to fill in each time you create a new document based on the template. You may have been exposed to templates that ship with Word. For example, the basic letter or memo templates frequently come in handy. One time saver I've created is a pleading template. To create this template I first open a Word document and set up the format I would like me pleading to have.

Step 2: Creating "blanks"

Next, I can create the "blanks" that I fill in every time I create a new pleading. As you can see at right, blanks will be county, district, plaintiff name, defendant name, case number, pleading title, date, attorney address, and attorney names. Creating the "blanks" is the hard part, which is kind of silly because the "blanks" are only moderately helpful. All the "blanks" really do is make it easy to replace place holder text in the document, by automatically highlighting the text to replace. Skip this step if you don't care.

In Office 2007, you go to the Insert tab on the Ribbon bar.

Next, go to the Quick Parts button.

Then select the Field menu item. In the Field dialog, select MacroButton in the Field name list and DoFieldClick in the Macro name list.

Type the text that will act as a place holder for your "blank" in the Display text box. Hit the OK button and your "blank" will be inserted.

Step 3: Saving the template

To save as a template, go to save and select "Word Template" in the Save As Type box. In earlier versions of Word, selecting Template as the Save Type will automatically change the folder to the templates directory on your computer. In Office 2007, there is a Trusted Templates on the left side of the Save As dialog box (see picture at left). You will want to save templates to the templates folder to make them easy to find and use later.

Step 4: Use the template

To use the template go to New in Word and select your new template from the list of templates (in Office 2007 this will be under a tab called My Templates).

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Edit .pdf files online

I've got links to two (free) online applications this morning that allow you to do two completely different, yet extremely useful things with your .pdf files.

First is PDFescape which allows you to neatly fill in .pdf forms online and save the finished product sans watermark. You can add text, checkmarks, arrows and links to your document and there's also a whiteout option to "delete". PDFescape is not a full replacement for the adobe pro suite or (my preference) foxit pro pack, and it's value beyond filling in the blanks on forms is probably negligible, but it has it's place and it's likely something you'll find a use for a couple of times a month.

Second we have PDFhammer. This is a really great app that I expect to use often in the future. PDFhammer allows you to rearrange pages, merge multiple .pdf's, and delete single pages out of .pdf documents. According to the page there are also plans in the future to rotate pages and stamp watermarks on the documents (Exhibit A, B, C... maybe?). [Edit - The site had a server error when I tried to access it at the time of this post. I have since used the site and can vouch that it does what it's supposed to do. - BB]

I know we've got lots of good .pdf posts planned for the reader(s), so stay tuned.
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