Solve programming problems with Microsoft Office

26 July 2022

You might have heard of the law of the instrument: it’s the idea that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Put another way, it’s easy to fall back on familiar tools instead of using the right tool for the job. I have this in mind as I confess that I have, on occasion, used Microsoft Office for programming.

When you’re writing Python or HTML, you’re basically writing text. Microsoft Word isn’t designed for coding, and so does not have the features you would expect of a proper development environment (such as code completion and syntax highlighting). It does, however, have some powerful features that development environments don’t (at least in my experience).

• Version comparisons: I received a modified version of code from a reviewer, and used the Compare feature in Word to mark up the changes that had been made so I could quickly see them. If you need to do this a lot, Meld is probably a better option for managing versions and merges. In my case, this was a one-off, and Word was available and required zero installation and learning.

• Mail merge: When creating the lists of room and object data for Mission Python, I started off organising the data in a spreadsheet, such as the room names and dimensions. I then used a mail merge to generate the Python code, which I could paste into my integrated development environment (IDE). Using mail merge saved a lot of rekeying (I could focus on the data and ignore the Python syntax). It was extremely efficient when I needed to make substantial map edits. I’ve also used this technique for building web interfaces, including my mood surfing experience Wild Mood Swings.

• Saving HTML from Word: This is mostly useful if you have a document that’s already in a Word-friendly format that you need to convert to HTML. You can use Save As to save your document as a filtered HTML file. The results aren’t brilliant. In particular, bullets are not syntactically correct, bold text is coded with the HTML bold tag instead of the strong tag, and there’s a lot of custom Word CSS at the top of the document. But, if you’re writing a long web page, Word can take care of the headings, links, and paragraph breaks for you, and give you some reasonable HTML to edit.

• Printing. Visual Studio Code is a useful free code editor, but it doesn’t allow you to print your code. I still find paper useful for reviewing and debugging long programs, so I copy the code from Visual Studio Code and paste it into Word for printing. When I copy from Visual Studio Code, the syntax highlighting copies with it, so I get better results than I do by opening the file in Word.

I’m sure there must be better development environments available than I am using. As a hobbyist programmer with a limited budget, though, I’m happy to use free and cheap tools and plug the gaps with Microsoft Office when it helps. It might not be the best tool for the job, but for most people it’s already installed and it’s easy to use. Sometimes the wrong tool does the job just right.

* For powerful time-saving ideas, see my latest book 100 Top Tips: Microsoft Excel. For an introduction to mail merge, see Microsoft Office for the Older and Wiser. It’s out of print now, but still available on Kindle and second hand. It's also widely stocked in UK libraries.

Image credit: Markus Spiske at Unsplash. Thank you, Markus!

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