Off the record - Craig Box

If you have a document take 5-15 seconds at "Requesting virus scan..." in Microsoft Word, you will think "Pesky virus scanner!". But while this fault is most commonly Norton AntiVirus, it can also manifest in another circumstance: where you have a document with an attached template on a share you can't access any more.

If you are a Windows tech, you have no excuse for not knowing about Sysinternal's Filemon - when you know exactly what an application is accessing, it lets you solve a multitude of problems, including this one. We have a customer with an application that generates Word files based on a template, in the same location as the program is being run from. Long before our involvement they appear to have had a server named "Server" (imaginitive naming) and ran the program from \\Server\Share. There is no Server any more, so the documents from that period all cause a timeout trying to find a share that doesn't exist.
Thankfully, when their current server was installed, a drive mapping was created, so all the documents from that point on are attached to a template on G:\. Therefore the task becomes to search-and-replace the template on all the old Word documents.

There is no easier way to do this than using Word's VBA, which is unfortunate, as you have to script a load of each document, which means each one takes 5-15 seconds to process. There are third party utilities I've seen that handle Word automation, but you may as well just run a macro, which appears in its full splendour below the fold.

I'd be interested to know if there was a library that let you edit Word documents, so we could do this by another method.

Net result however, documents now open speedy, and customer is happy.

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