[E McElroy[_2_]]

Hi DCH:

I promised to get back to you after taking a longer look at the problems of
trying to implement white font on a blue screen in Word 2007. Here are my
thoughts based on the experiments I've done and my current knowledge of Word
2007:

CHANGING ALL FONT COLORS:
=========================
I took a look at setting the font color of all styles en masse and came up
with a short macro to do this (it's not hard - the code is listed below).
After running the macro, text was white in the standard styles (those
displayed in the Styles pane at the beginning of a new document), and the
text color wasn't affected by themes. I inserted some "smart art" diagrams
(where do they get those names?) and the diagram text was also white.

As I discuss below, there was at least one surprise and, of course, there
are likely to be others since I didn't test every single feature in Word (I'm
far from knowing what all the features are, anyway). There are also objects
that have to be colored white such as the lines of tables. That isn't part of
the code but can be added.

CHANGING THE SELECTION HIGHLIGHT:
=================================
I have not found a way to tell Word to change the highlight colors. Can it
be done? Well, it can be simulated by actually altering the document when a
selection is made and restoring it when the selection is not. This is doable
with the Selection object. However, this is not a trivial matter since there
are many types of objects that can be selected, and highlighting appropriate
for text may not be appropriate for other objects. Additionally, a fair
amount of bulletproofing code must be added to make sure that changes to the
document as part of the selection highlight process are not permanent if
there should be a crash. I don't want to bother you with a lot of detail but,
while this might be possible, it could be a time-consuming task to do it
properly, not only in code development but especially in testing.

CONCLUSION:
===========
Those familiar with the Word programming SDKs may know better ways to try to
solve this problem. From what I currently know, even if it were possible to
get Word 2007 to emulate a white on blue screen, it will take time and carry
some initial risk. Your best approach in the short term, and quite possibly
the long term, is the one you decided on initially: go back to Word 2003.
It's a painless solution and the functionality you want is supported by MS
and will work without surprises.

CODE TO CHANGE STYLE FONT COLOR EN MASSE:
=========================================
For those who are interested, here is a simple macro which enumerates the
styles and changes their font color. I counted 265 built-in styles, only a
small subset of which have symbols defined. Touching one particular style,
the one whose name is "Article / Section" had a very unusual side effect: it
added numbered list characteristics to the various Heading styles. Hence,
there is code here to simply avoid it. I'm not sure when this style comes
into play or what the implication is of not setting its color.

I found that setting only the Color property was not enough since some of
the "emphasis" styles continued to go their own way. Changing the ColorIndex
property solved that. There is another color property, ColorIndexBI, which I
did not set since the brief documentation for the property indicates that
it's for right to left languages. If this is relevant, it should also be set.

Here is the macro:

Sub WhiteFont()
Dim CurStyle As Style
Dim CurDoc As Document

Set CurDoc = ActiveDocument

For CurIndex = 1 To CurDoc.Styles.Count Step 1
Set CurStyle = CurDoc.Styles(CurIndex)
If CurStyle.NameLocal "Article / Section" Then
CurStyle.Font.Color = wdColorWhite
CurStyle.Font.ColorIndex = wdWhite
End If
Next
End Sub

Of course, this can be improved for those who want to experiment:

1. If there is no ActiveDocument, the procedure should exit.
2. An up front dialog box can be added to allow the user to select the color.
3. VBA has a simple Collection object which can be used to store the initial
colors. This can provide the basis of a Restore function to put the initial
colors back.

If anybody does any experiments along these lines I'd be curious to hear
what your results are.

Ed McElroy

"DCH" wrote:

The deletion of the blue background/white text option in Word 2007 is sending
me back to Word 2003. Can I uninstall Word 2007 and re-install Word 2003
while retaining the rest of Office 2007? And if so, can you tell me how?

Many thanks for whatever suggestions anyone may have,

DCH