- Recovering More of Your Work with a Shorter AutoRecover Interval
- Automatically Saving Your Work Frequently
- Closing a Document Without Saving
- Closing All Your Open Documents
- Making Backups as You Work
- Showing More Items on the Recent Documents List
- Opening the Most Recently Used Document at Startup
- Clearing the Recent Documents List
- Creating and Opening Document Workspaces
- Automatically Prompting for Document Properties
- Creating a Trusted Location for Documents
- Viewing Total Editing Time Updated in Real-Time
- Calculating Billable Time Charges
- Locking Document Formatting
- Preventing Untracked Changes
- Setting Up a Document for Structured Editing
- Inspecting a Document for Personal Information
- Viewing Two Documents Side by Side
- Updating All Fields Automatically
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Viewing Total Editing Time Updated in Real-Time
The total amount of time that a document has been edited is useful for freelancers, lawyers, consultants, and other professionals who bill for their time. Knowing how long you have spent working on a document enables you to provide a more accurate accounting of your time.
If you have a time budget that you're trying to stick to, you may find yourself constantly checking the document's Properties dialog box to view the Total editing time value. Rather than wasting time performing that chore, add the EditTime field to your document. Word's EditTime field displays the total time, in minutes, that the document has had the system focus (and, presumably, has been edited) since the time at which the document was created. This is the same as the Total editing time value displayed in the Statistics tab of the document's Properties dialog box.
Follow these steps to add some code that displays the total editing time with the word minutes added for clarity:
- Type some descriptive text (such as Total Editing Time:).
- Press Ctrl+F9 to start a new Word field (signified by the { and } braces).
- Between the field braces, type the following:
EDITTIME \# "0 minutes" \* mergeformat
- Press F9 to complete and update the field.
Now all you have to do is update the field to check the total editing time.
If even that sounds like a hassle, you can add a relatively simple macro to the document that will update the EditTime field in real-time. Open the Visual Basic Editor and insert a module in the document's project. Add the code in Listing 3.10 to the module.
Listing 3.10. Updating the EditTime Field in Real-Time
Public Sub UpdateEditTime()
Dim f As Field
For Each f In ThisDocument.Fields
If f.Type = wdFieldEditTime Then
f.Update
End If
Next 'f
Application.OnTime Now + TimeValue("00:01:00"), "UpdateEditTime"
End Sub
This procedure runs through all the fields in the document looking for one where the Type property is wdFieldEditTime, which corresponds to the EditTime field. When the property is found, the Update method refreshes the field. The key to the real-time updating is the Application.OnTime statement, which sets up the UpdateEditTime procedure to run again in one minute. Note that you'll probably need to adjust the project name ("Chapter03") and the module name ("Chapter3") to match the name of your project and module.