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Customizing the Wordfast template

http://www.proz.com/translation-articles/articles/996/1/Customizing-the-Wordfast-template

By Andreas Berger

Published on 10/19/2006

How to make useful changes to both the visual appearance and

keyboard functions of 'wordfast.dot' as well as MS Word's templates in

general.

Author: Andreas Berger

Germany

English to German

translator

http://proz.com/profile/133995

Hello to the community, dear users of 'Wordfast' for MSWord!

The following ideas came to my mind when I was wondering: àis there

no individual language version of Wordfast available?Ò And can it not be

'customized', as it is common with other programs?

Upon my inquiry, a person from the Wordfast support team indicated to

me that careful changes can indeed be made to Wordfast's keyboard

shortcuts; giving this a try via the àAdjust toolbars/ keyboardÒ dialog I

soon found out that in much the same way the entire WF interface

(excepting only for the Setup window) is open for adjustment - and felt

that this fact was too little known.

(I might add for all German users who care to know that I have already

prepared a customized version of wordfast.dot -aka 'the program file'-

for shared experience, downloadable under the àWordfast at Yahoo

Group's 'Home/Files' submenu, from a newly created folder named

"Customized 'wordfast.dot's" ... ;-) You may have to register with the

group to be able to access it; and please remember that this version is

intended only for German users.)

I would therefore like to encourage others to create their own 'wf.dots',

which can be easily achieved right within MsWord as described below:

For self-confident users: all you need to do is open the file

'wordfast.dot' in MSWord and use the 'Extras/Customize' dialog box to

start editing by left & right clicking the desired menu entries. You will

see that anything is possible, including changes to the entire interface

language! Renaming a menu entry is just a matter of typing your 'line'

into the provided space! Some icon editing features (both are available

by click-right from the 'menu's context menu') may require the Visual

Basic editor of Word to be installed.

And now for the details, with a few considerations beforehand:

First:

the reason for having to open the file àwordfast.dotÒ itself is, if you

make changes to the Wordfast menu without opening the original file,

which is absolutely possible, then these will be written into the WordÓs

standard template you have chosen to àautostartÒ with Word, usually

àNormal.dotÒ. It is, however, recommended to keep these templates

apart, in any case.

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Second:

do NOT type anything in the document window!! Go straight and open

the 'customize toolbars' dialog, instead. It is only from here that you

can change virtually any aspect of appearance, of any toolbar available:

change the order of entries completely by 'drag 'n drop', change titles

and texts of menu entries by right clicking them, add or even edit menu

icons, and shortcuts (note that the dialog box has to remain open

during the whole process, also if you do not in fact touch it!). Setting

keystroke shortcuts for menu entries takes nothing more than to add

the '&' (ampersand) character right in front of the letter that wants the

shortcut. You will have to confirm whatever you wrote in the according

line in the contextmenu, and to close it, with 'Enter'.

Needles to say, the same can be done to all other Word toolbars and

menus, via right click, too! (Some icon editing features may require the

Visual Basic editor of Word to be installed from the CD)

Third:

(or second, the order is up to you, once the dialog is open) for setting

individual keyboard 'function shortcuts' (not to be confused with the

above mentioned 'MENU keys'), press the 'keyboard' button in the

'Customize toolbars' dialog window.

The background for my doing this was that Wordfast unfortunately sets

some 'Ctrl+Alt+...' keys, which are bound, however, to interfere with

those used by Windows itself. They did with me. You will find it irritating

when pressing Ctrl+Alt+A and have Winamp or some other program

start that has these keys assigned, for instance! You may argue that

this will not happen unless Word is out of focus/ foreground. So,

another reason may be that the whole idea of keyboard shortcuts is

that a user has to know them 'by heart' and might get them all

confused when they are all on 'Ctrl+Alt'.

And this is how to turn them off: in the 'keyboard' dialog box, go

straight to the 'Macros' entry in the first droplist and see all functions

stored in wordfast.dot on the right hand side, with the according keys

shown in the fields below - this dialog offers plenty of options, such as

testing your own shortcuts and telling you if Word already uses them,

and for what. There is also a button for restoring the individual defaults.

Note that any keys you may now set by clicking 'assign' will overwrite

existing ones. Remember you now have two templates open:

àwordfast.dotÒ, opened manually and àNormal.dotÒ, or the template of

your personal standard, which Word loads automatically on program

startup.

Just in order to avoid confusion: MS Word stores keyboard shortcuts as

àmacrosÒ right within that template, so when overwriting shortcuts that

Word has already assigned to some other function in the standard

template, they will also be saved there! It maybe thus misleading that

there is an option at the right hand bottom of the dialog box, where it

says àSave in ...Ò, to choose one of the active templates for storing the

current changes (if àwordfast.dotÒ was loaded as the only document

window, then it will here be selected by default, the second option being

'Normal.dot', in our example).

But:

this will (obviously) not prevent changes to the standard template when

overwriting a set shortcut, since on runtime Word cannot execute two

functions associated with the same given command! So, the option

refered to above is just for the unlikely case that you wished to store

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ALL changes into 'Normal.dot', but don't do that! Overwriting Word's inherent settings cannot always be

helped, it isn't such a big deal and can be restored any time!

Personally, the first thing I did here was alter all of wordfastÓs àCtrl+AltÒ shortcuts by using àCtrl+ShiftÒ or

àAlt+ShiftÒ instead. That's what I recommend, too.

Finally, if everything is taylorfit, save 'wordfast.dot', close it and restart Word (you'll be asked to save

changes, however, as with any other document on exit). That's it.

So much for this little 'Customize dots' intro,

I hope to have told at least some of you out there good news, who found wordfast's menus a trifle

awkward to navigate.

Good luck!

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