Archive
How to ease editing work in MS-Word by automating search/replace operations
- If you frequently have to edit documents according to a large number of editorial rules and regulations
- and if you can partially automate these edit operations (or at least highlight suspicious passages for human review) with Word’s search/replace,
- I can recommend an add-in that can automate even the repeated search/replace operations (like the 57 in the video below)
- and even help you manage your search/replace strings and regular expressions in a spreadsheet which it can load from:
- Greg Maxey’s VBA Find & Replace Word Add-in. See it in action (click for full size):
TwoThree Caveats: :- At this point, I cannot get the add-in to work only in Word 2010. Even if I lower Macro security and allow programmatic access to the VBA project, when trying to launch the add-in from the ribbon, Word 2013 complains: “The macro cannot be found or has been disabled due to your macro security settings”:
.
- The automation is only as good as your underlying search/replace operations. (Hint: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”)
- I think I will refrain from search/replace during “Tracking changes” – as in the video – , and rather use “Compare documents” after the replace operations – too many quirks otherwise…
- At this point, I cannot get the add-in to work only in Word 2010. Even if I lower Macro security and allow programmatic access to the VBA project, when trying to launch the add-in from the ribbon, Word 2013 complains: “The macro cannot be found or has been disabled due to your macro security settings”:
Introducing the LangLabEmailer
- The LangLabEmailer helps integrating the digital audio lab (still widely operating based on files and network shares) into the departmental language teaching and learning process by automatically forwarding (audio, text) assessments and assignments collected in the digital audio lab to teachers and students via campus mail (using MS-Exchange automation).
- Easy on the Language Lab Manager who can "set up and forget": 1000s of assessment files will reach their originating students and teachers in near real time without you lifting a finger.
- To earn "extra credit", show your teachers how they can override the default LangLabEmailer behavior by adding “_noemailing” or “_nostudentemailing” to the folder name when saving their digital audio lab collections.
- Status of the language lab and purpose of the software
- Features
- Prerequisites
- Downloading
- Installing
- Configuring (and sharing back)
- Running or scheduling
- End User options
- Troubleshooting
- Requesting features
- Getting Updates
- Uninstalling
- Samples & questions at my IALLT 2013 session.
Protected: How you can automate giving your teachers access to your Sanako language lab in the offices and from home
How to batch download all submissions as a zip file from a Moodle: Gradebook File-upload assignment column.
- I have no file upload assignment with submissions handy in my own Moodle course, so I am patching this together from other universities (thanks, umass.edu, cotc.edu).
- “ Another time saver you can use is the Download all assignments as a zip link. This will package all uploaded documents from any submissions in the assignment into
a zipped folder that you can download. Once downloaded, you can unzip the file and access each paper. This can be a real time saver!”. Image: - Extra: This procedure will add the student’s name to the file. No more wading through submitted audio files named by students trying to identify submitters.
How to batch watermark your images for free with Irfanview
– just to be a bit more concise than this useful, but long post on yet another great feature of this free program (shout-out to Kai). Not shown here: after making your settings here, click button “Start batch”.
Automatically download all documents/files/images linked from a web page
You can easily do this in FireFox with a free extension from Braunschweig (Germany): DownThemAll:
Automating Auralog Tell-Me-More with AutoIt. Presentation at EUROCALL 2008
Auralog Tell-Me-More is a leading language learning software system which provides a vast amount of content in an advanced technical infrastructure that we found lacking in usability within an higher education language learning environment.
AutoIt is a programming language for GUI automation which I used to better integrate the Auralog software into the higher education language learning process, including
- programmatic
creation of courses and accounts
- programmatic extraction and digital repository management for over 30.000 learning units.
- programmatic creation of 10,000s of learning paths,
Results were presented (screencast) at EUROCALL 2008: “Automating Auralog (pdf)”:
creates 100s of courses , creates
and enrols
up to 2,000 student accounts every term,
- content extraction
produces files
for adding search
and spreadsheet for sort/filter functionality:
- learning path creation.
More detailed background information here: plagwitz_auralog_accounts_project_pub.pdf, plagwitz_auralog_project_pub.pdf