Discover the benefits of document properties

Documents don’t just have content ­ they also have properties.

In Word 2003 and earlier you can alter some of them by going to File, then Properties.

In Word 2007 you have to hit the Office Button, then Prepare, then Properties.

This opens a pane above the document.

Click on the ‘Document Properties’ title of this page and you’ll get a one-item menu for ‘Advanced Properties…’ which in turn will produce a similar tabbed dialogue as seen in previous versions.

Some document properties are already filled in. ‘Author’ for example, defaults to what you entered when you installed Word, or edited from Tools, Options, User Information, but you can change this for individual documents.

You can also fill in other properties, such as Company, Manager, Subject, Keywords, Comments and so on.

If you’d like any of these to be pre-filled on documents, then open the document template for editing, add the required properties, then save and close the template.

If you’ve put anything in the Title box this will appear in the ‘File name’ box when you first save the document.

Document Properties can be manipulated with macros, and it’s here that Custom Properties shine.

To use a custom property in a macro it must first exist and have a placeholder value.

Once again, this is best done by editing the template. Word provides a number of predefined custom properties you can use, but you’re not limited to these.

To define your own, first supply a name for the property, then choose a type ­ text, number, date or Yes/No.

Then give it a value.

For Yes/No this has to be one or the other, for numbers and dates this can be zero, and for text you must type something ­ a space will do, but you can’t leave the box empty or the ‘Add’ button will remain greyed out.

Every article I write has to be invoiced and for that I need such information as the title, publication, word count and so on.

Having set up these properties with dummy values, they are ready to be manipulated.

I have a macro that produces a dialogue box in which I can enter the real values of these properties ­ either by typing it in or selecting text from a dropdown list.

This generates the information needed for the invoice, adds it to a table of invoices, and a further macro extracts the information from the table to produce the actual invoice.

I’ve had the system going for 14 years, now and, apart from an upgrade from Wordbasic to VBA in 1997, it has worked without a hitch.

Open Office also features custom document properties but you only have four text fields to play with.

These don’t show in Explorer ­ though the standard properties do ­ but you can insert their values into the document using a field.

Word document properties are also exposed in Windows Explorer ­ right-click on a .doc file, choose Properties, and you should get a multi-tabbed dialogue showing both the built-in and custom properties.

You can edit these just as you can from within Word.

One rather bizarre property is the ‘Total Editing Time’.

When you create a new document the clock starts ticking, even if you minimise it without typing anything or saving the document.

So this doesn’t really give any indication of time spent editing.

It’s a read-only value, so you can’t change it from the properties dialogue.

It also defies attempts at alteration from the VBA BuiltInDocumentProperties collection.

However, a little ancient lore can be used.

The pre-Word 97 macro language, Wordbasic, still lingers on as a subset of VBA, and the code shown in the box on the next page will do the trick.

For a quick and dirty way of zeroing the edit time, try ‘Save As…’.

You don’t have to change the file name, but the edit time will be reset to that of the ‘new’ document.

This will also change the creation and modified dates.

Another oddity of the Total Editing Time is how it’s exposed in Windows XP Explorer.

This appears in the form ‘01/01/1601 hh:mm’. To make sense of this, ignore the 01/01/1601 part and adjust the hours, if necessary, by the local offset from GMT.

Windows apparently keeps track of time by counting the number of 100 nanosecond ticks since 00:00 on 1 January 1601 according to the Gregorian calendar, so something seems to have been lost in translation in XP.

Windows 98 makes a better job, showing the time in minutes. In Windows Millennium the field is blank, so perhaps that’s when it started to go downhill, but the good news is that Vista gets it right, with the time appearing in the hh:mm:ss format.