> Do I have to go through Visual Basic macros to do this One does Word automation using VB. AFAIK there is no other way. We can help guide you thru the steps (this is how I would do it): - create UserForm(s) to collect parameters - create a custom menu using Tools -> Customize with each item tied to a macro Each macro would open a userform. The click event of the OK button on the UserForm would shell Python.
A slight alternative would be to have the macros call Windows Scripting Host files that would present the dialog and shell Python. A bigger alternative would be to have the macros shell Python and write the parameter collecting mechanism in Python. > or is there a _good_ way?! I take it that you don't enjoy VB programming. It certainly is more wordy and less flexible than Python, but for relatively small tasks like this not a big deal. I've written 10s of thousands of lines of VBA for Word and Access. Of course I prefer Python when I can use it. ------------- ME: Thanks very much for responding, Bob and James! I did program a lot in VB's earlier versions, but it has grown... My reason for not considering VB was that the actual processing would make excellent use of the Python collection objects /dictionaries/, which in my mind would hold words of the Microsoft Word document. (The app's purpose is to analyze words of possibly very large Word documents.) Plus I suppose that a macro which would loop with a few lines over each word of the doc will be slow, although I don't if there is a compiling or byte-code mechanism. Am I wrong? I don't know if having a VB as glue to shelling Python is perfectly fine performance-wise, and it certainly would be a simple way to handle the dialog boxes that collect the parameters. Maybe that is a much better way than wondering about calling Python /shelling, calling a DLL, whatever/ directly. Next question: Is Microsoft Word's API for Python published like for VB and easy to use? Best, Göran /Goran with two dots/ :-) Stockholm, Sweden _______________________________________________ Python-win32 mailing list Python-win32@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32