OOo Tips & Tricks -- Macros

A question was posed about calling a macro from inside another macro. This was an e-mail posted by Andrew Pitonyak, the Macro Maestro of OOo. It begins with an overview and then a line by line response.

Let me start with some text that I just recently created: If you want to learn programming in StarBasic, I am aware of a few documents that might be of use. Here is a list of resources that I recommend:

http://www.pitonyak.org/book/ You have to pay for this one, but it assumes that you know little to nothing. The advantage to this book is that it discusses all of the subroutines and functions. It teaches you what to do. I consider this more complete than the rest of the material. At the very least, download the free chapters from the publisher. Chapter 1 is an excellent introduction no matter what you do. I think that the free chapters speak for themselves. Remember, of course, that you skip a lot between the free chapter 1 and the free chapter 15 :-)
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-1826?q=StarOffice Sun wrote a macro programming guide. This is FREE. This book is accessible but it does not hold your hand as much as my book and it is less complete.
http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.sxw My free macro document. This is NOT good for learning, this is good to see how a particular task is accomlished. This is a great use if you kind of know what you are doing. I have links to other excellent sites with examples as well.
http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/openoffice/docs/ This is a free how-to guide that discusses how to use the macro recording facility. I also added some information on how libraries are organized and such.
The Developer's Guide has it all, but it is difficult to start with.

That said, I have provided inline answers to your questions:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Pettigrew [mailto:john@pettigrew.org.uk]
> Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 2:32 PM
> To: users@openoffice.org
> Subject: [users] Macro query
>
>
> I am in the process of switching from MS Office to OOo, and
> this means I have to translate my many macros. There are
> two things (so far) that are causing me a problem.
>
> 1) Is it possible to call a macro from within another macro?
> If I try this in a recording, OOo ignores any call to a macro
> (or, rather, it *performs* the macro but doesn't record that
> it's done so in the new macro). This makes it hard to work
> out for myself what the necessary command might be.

Yes, you may call a macro from within another macro. The problem is that the macro recorder does not record these sorts of things. To call another macro, you need to...
- Make certain that the library that contains the macro that you want to call is loaded
- You can not easily call a macro stored in another document, but you can call a macro stored in the same document or in the application itself.
- You simply call it, nothing special about it.

> 2) Is it possible to establish the character positions of the
> start and end of a piece of selected text from within a macro,
> and to place the cursor at specific positions?

I see this as more than one question. I can easily obtain a particular character location, but this location is not an index value or something that is easily readable. When you obtain selected text can be many things... Realize that you can have multiple disjoint selections. If I make a selection of one range of text, then I can easily find the start and end positions and place the cursor at specific locations. This is discussed starting at 7.1 in my macro document.

> TiA
>
> John
> --
> John Pettigrew XL Cambridge - contract and freelance editing
> Biology specialist Molecular biology, genetics, biotechnology
> john@xl-cambridge.com http://www.xl-cambridge.com/
> PGP public key available

--
Andrew Pitonyak My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.sxw
My Macro Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Free Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php < /P >

Last edited 21 May 2005