A collection of Word VBA macros intended for Medical Writing projects.
The macros were developed with Office 365 for Windows but should work with earlier versions of Word. The macros have not been tested with Word for Apple Mac.
To install macros, open the macro editor in Microsoft Word. In Windows, press Alt+F11 while in a document to open the editor. You can also press Alt+F8 to view current macros. Refer to the official documentation for additional details.
Here's a brief description of the content of this repository:
AutoFitTablesToMargins
A very simple macro to fit all tables in the document to the page margins. It also stops tables from automatically adjusting the column widths to fit the contents, which is often annoying. This is the equivalent to unchecking "Table properties" > "Options" > "Automatically resize to fit contents." If you prefer to keep that behavior, just comment out the relevant line of code.
DateCalculator
This macro adds a given number of days to a date. Its intended purpose is to help write or QC dates, e.g., in patient safety narratives. It calculates future dates based on the selected text plus the user-provided number of days. The output is displayed in "dd-mmm-yyyy" format. The macro provides both the inclusive and non-inclusive end date.
DrugNameReplacer
This macro finds a company-specific drug name/code and replaces it with the drug's generic name, applying the correct capitalization based on context. For example, capitalizing the first letter if the name is used at the start of a sentence, as title case or upper case when used in headings, or as lower case within a sentence. Replacement is based on the formatting styles used in the document. It will also exclude replacements within study identifiers (if applicable to your use case). The macro must be modified accordingly per your style guide, drug names, and study identifiers.
The standard Word 'Find and Replace' does a poor job of matching the correct case of a replacement. If you've ever had to find and replace a drug name 300+ times in an Investigator's Brochure, fixing the capitalization as you go, this macro is for you.
Note that headers and footers are not checked. You should be using alignment tabs to ensure you only have to replace it once in the header anyway, using 'Link to Previous', even across portrait and landscape pages.
FormatBoldTextBlue
This macro will color any bold text found within a selection blue. It is intended to help create external crosslinks within a document. During the PDF publishing and submissions process, the Medical Writing Operations or Regulatory Operations group will ensure that bold blue text contains a hyperlink to the external file. If your company uses red instead of blue color to signify this, just uncomment and delete the relevant lines of code in the macro. I found this macro useful for signifying links in bibliographies. Just highlight your whole bibliography with the cursor and run the macro, assuming your reference manager, e.g. EndNote, has already applied bold formatting to the author names. EndNote can't apply colors, so I needed to create this macro to do that.