Brandwares

• In Word for Windows, you can set a separate character style for the control. The VBA commands for sorting styles don’t do the same thing as the Word interface, so I haven’t been able to make this work the same as in Windows. Using my Content Control add-in, the content controls currently take on the style of the paragraph in which they are inserted, except for the Date Picker which displays Times New Roman (?!) when a date is selected.
• The color for a control can be set to the same colors as in Windows, but there isn’t a custom color input yet.
• If and when Microsoft gets around to adding content controls, the checkbox will probably select checked and unchecked characters from the macOS Emoji & Symbols dialog. Unfortunately, that dialog includes many system fonts that can’t be embedded in a file (this is a big problem with choosing bullets in PowerPoint, but that’s material for a different article). So I’ve created a subset of checked and unchecked symbols that can be used in checkboxes. These characters will work as expected and can be embedded in a template or document.
• The properties dialog in the Content Control add-in can’t preview the checkbox characters, because there is no way for VBA to retrieve the symbols currently used by a checkbox.
• The date picker should be able to use a world-wide variety of locales and calendar types. I haven’t been able to program the system calls to macOS to get this information yet. The date picker currently uses U.S. defaults for date formatting. Using Microsoft date formatting codes (dd-mm-yyyy, etc.), you should be able to set up dates for other languages based on a Latin (Western) script. This is one of the items that needs testing in other languages.
• A known error occurs if you try to insert a Content Control into an old Word file in .doc format. You’ll see an error like Run-time error 445: Object doesn’t support this action. Update the file to .docx format to fix the issue.
• A few users get error messages when trying to modify existing content controls. To date, we have not been able to reproduce, and thus solve, this bug. If you get an error, please post a comment including your processor info (Intel or Apple chip), macOS version and Office edition.

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