Recreating a document with comments?

mrlemmer11

New Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2015
Messages
32
Hello All,

So, my company has roughly 40,000 documents ( some 1 page, some 100 pages long) all stored on the intranet.

Our team need to go thru all of these documents and obtain certain information from them. So we start by going to the intranet, pulling one form down and opening it.

I have already built a tool that through keystrokes, applies different comments where someone indicates.

After they are done, all the comments and their associations are extracted into excel.

My question is this.... lets say a week later, someone decides they want to review/change some of those comments. How can I recreate that Document with all the comments located in order? Obviously I the user can just save the form with their comments on it... however, as stated above we are talking about 40,000 documents, some 100 pages long already stored on a server somewhere. I don't think it's practical to resave all of these comment-applied documents again and use up all that space.

My idea is to write the .scope / .range / .comments(x) / .author all to a text file. Then when someone wants to recreate the document with the comments on it, they pull down the original document, hit an applyComments macro and wahla. However, I can't figure out how to have the macro/vba understand where to put the comments inside of the document. Order isn't a prob, it's just where in the document is the issue. I thought about searching the documents text for a match to the .range of the comment, however, some of these comments won't have a range... so that won't work.

I thought about bookmarks.... .comments(28) goes immediately after bookmark28... but I run into the same problem... how do the boomarks know where to go?

As i'm writing this, im thinking that I may be able to count the characters in between each comment and build it that way. Since the original document is not allowed to be changed or edited without creating a new file for public release I don't need to worry about a fresh copy of it having its characters change... so maybe something like from start of document to .comment(1) = 309 characters. from .comment(1) to .comment(2) = 48 characters. Then when I write to file each comments attributes, I also save how many characters in between each one, then on a fresh document download, on launch of the macro, it can use that info to populate....I'm kinda thinking that is my best route as of right now.

----

So with that, I ask your thoughts on opinions on how I can accomplish this. Confused or need more info? Reply and ask away and I shall answer. Thanks in advance everyone!
 

Excel Facts

Return population for a City
If you have a list of cities in A2:A100, use Data, Geography. Then =A2.Population and copy down.

Forum statistics

Threads
1,224,244
Messages
6,177,391
Members
452,773
Latest member
D P

We've detected that you are using an adblocker.

We have a great community of people providing Excel help here, but the hosting costs are enormous. You can help keep this site running by allowing ads on MrExcel.com.
Allow Ads at MrExcel

Which adblocker are you using?

Disable AdBlock

Follow these easy steps to disable AdBlock

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the "Pause on this site" option.
Go back

Disable AdBlock Plus

Follow these easy steps to disable AdBlock Plus

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the toggle to disable it for "mrexcel.com".
Go back

Disable uBlock Origin

Follow these easy steps to disable uBlock Origin

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the "Power" button.
3)Click on the "Refresh" button.
Go back

Disable uBlock

Follow these easy steps to disable uBlock

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the "Power" button.
3)Click on the "Refresh" button.
Go back
Back
Top