(This post is a continuation of this post.)
When my school’s server was down I was asked what we could do to enable the teachers to enter grades for the report card.
We discussed three possibilities:
- Send all 155 documents to the teachers and afterwards copy and paste to create the report card for each student. If each student has 10 teachers we are talking about 1,550 copy and paste operations. Estimated time: 9 hours. Sanity value: Negative.
- Share the documents using Dropbox. Dropbox gives you 2GB for free file sharing. The teachers would have to download and install the software. To open the Word documents and save them they would need Word 2003 or something that would not change any formatting of the original documents. Only one teacher could edit a student at a time. Before they could start work they would have to wait for the 155 files to be downloaded. After making changes they would have to keep their Internet connection open till the changes were uploaded. This solution avoids the copying and pasting challenge, but requires quite a bit computer knowledge and software to work well. Also, what for teachers not running Windows?
- Upload the Word documents to GoogleDocs. This would not have any of the drawbacks illustrated for Dropbox. However, I have had an instance where I could not save my changes and had to start all over again. Would this happen a lot? A positive point was that two teachers could edit the same report card at the same time.
The decision was to try GoogleDocs.
Big was my surprise when I tried to upload the Word document and get it converted to GoogleDocs.
The four columns in the Word document converted into five in GoogleDocs and the column widths were all nonsense! I went back to the Word table to see if it had more than four columns. It did not.
Internet search revealed that GoogleDocs reportedly is not doing a good job converting tables. However, when I tried to import a table in a test document it did not add any columns.
I went back to the original table and discovered something strange. The same column had different width depending on which row you were in! The change occurred between Art & Design and Science.
When I selected the table all rows were selected, so it was one table and not two. When I looked at the properties of the columns I discovered that the box “Preferred width” was not checked.
When I centered the table and checked “Preferred width” the table looked normal in Word and was converted correctly in GoogleDocs. The challenge was to do these changes in a macro.
To make a long story short, I did not manage! I could center the table, but all my attempts to check the preferred width boxes were unsuccessful. I tried to copy the code that was created when I recorded the macro manually, but to no avail.
' set columns widths of second table to preferred width ' this code did not work, it gave the error message: ' "Cannot access individual columns in this collection because the table has mixed cell width 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(1).PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(1).PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(1).PreferredWidth = CentimetersToPoints(2.8) 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(2).PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(2).PreferredWidth = CentimetersToPoints(9) 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(3).PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(3).PreferredWidth = CentimetersToPoints(3.3) 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(4).PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints 'ActiveDocument.Tables(2).Columns(4).PreferredWidth = CentimetersToPoints(1)
I also tried things like this:
Selection.SelectColumn Selection.Columns.PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints Selection.Columns.PreferredWidth = CentimetersToPoints(2.83) Selection.Move Unit:=wdColumn, Count:=1 Selection.SelectColumn Selection.Columns.PreferredWidthType = wdPreferredWidthPoints Selection.Columns.PreferredWidth = CentimetersToPoints(9.63)
Since time was of an essence I ran my macro and then checked the boxes manually for all 155 Word documents. It took about an hour and was no great fun. I am still curious of how it can be achieved and will update this post if I find out.
[Update: see this forum post]
A last problem was that the Word document used a table to position text, but wanted no table border. Conversion always gave a border. I tried to set the border size to zero in Word and several other things, but GoogleDocs always showed a border. Manually I had to go in to all 155 GoogleDocs documents to change the border color to white. The smallest border size in GoogleDocs os 0.5 pt, not 0 pt.
Of course, if the Word document was made with GoogleDocs conversion in mind no manual corrections would have been necessary.
Here is an example of what the report looks like in GoogleDocs.
The next post will look at how the 155 individual Word documents can be created and named using mail merge and/or vbscript. (After that, I will look at more sensible approaches to the whole report card business.)
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