An In-depth Look at PRIME 97 for Word 97 - Make a Mark

by Lee Hudspeth

Bookmarks are one of Word's five most powerful features. The nice thing is, a Word bookmark is far more than just an electronic slip of paper jammed into a specific location inside a document. You can name this bookmark just about anything you want (more on the naming rules in a moment).

Yet with all this power revving under the hood, Word leaves you hanging by requiring that you decide what the name should be, even if your bookmark is sitting right on top of some text! Amazing, but true, and along comes our development team with yet another useful Word utility. You see, PRIME Make a Mark (MaM for short) creates a bookmark at the current location using a name based on the selected text. Say you've got "Lockergnome" selected when you run MaM, it very quietly but quickly -- no fuss or ringing bells -- creates a bookmark called, you guessed it, "Lockergnome" right there on top of that text.

To be specific, MaM takes whatever text is currently selected and attempts to create a new bookmark there using a name comprised of the first 15 characters of the selected material. If there are problems or errors with this prospective bookmark name (the name already exists, is illegal, or the selection doesn't contain any text), it displays a message summarizing Word's bookmark naming rules (see below) then shows a dialog box so you can type in another name.

Word's bookmark naming rules are:

* the bookmark name must not exceed 40 characters

* the first character of the bookmark name must be a letter

* any character beyond the first character must be a letter, a number, or an underscore; all other characters are illegal

Make a Mark is just one of dozens of productivity-enhancement utilities in PRIME 97 for Word 97, selected as one of the Top Ten Office Add-Ins by the prestigious PC World magazine. Check out a free 30-day trial at:
http://www.PRIMEConsulting.com/software/p97wd.html
or order your copy via our secure server at:
http://www.primeconsulting.com/software/primeorder1.html