MS Word max Char flag

Hi folks…It’s been a while since I’ve done any applescript, so go easy on me. I’ve done some searching on the forum, and haven’t found what I’m looking for, so I decided to post.

Basically, we have a text box in Oracle that only allows 2000 characters, and we’re using a template in word so that people don’t go over the max. But they have to manually check periodically to ensure that they have not exceded the limit.
I thought it would be really slick if I could write a script that would watch the character count and put up an error message when they’ve typed character number 2001. The only other requirement is that the script must be automatically launched when this particular word document is opened.

I guess my questions are these:

  1. Is it possible without running the word count function every second to watch the chars?
  2. ALL advice on how to procede would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks guys, ya’ll ROCK

Someone else may have a better answer for you, but this idea sounds pretty far-fetched to me. If there’s a solution, it’s probably VBA rather than AS.

What are you using to front-end your Oracle db? Could you just add the char count functionality to that interface?

Our Oracle Interface is the standard provided with Oracle. It runs through the web-browsers as long as you’re on the intranet (yes, intRAnet). Unfortunately, it’s not very flexible. We are a small company and did not want to pay for the premium services of full customizability from Oracle.

This is one of those things that if I could do, it’d make me look really good…but it’s not, by any means, a necessary thing.

Thanks for the thoughts (I was afraid that was the answer I was going to get).

Hmmm… Just another idea. Why you do use Word? Is it only because of the chars-count feature? If so, you can use other editors (such as Tex-Edit Plus, which counts characters on-the-fly) or even create your own text field + counter using AppleScript Studio.

JJ,

I hadn’t thought about that. We were using word because it is familiar to our employees, it is already installed on all of our 400+/- computers, and because we could setup a template for formatting and because of the char count.

I suppose i could write a text box + char count that included the proper formatting. I would need some help with the char counting part, but I’m pretty sure I could do the text box with formatting. I wonder if the textbox program could be stored on our oracle server, and be linked to when the user clicks on that field.
What do you think? Are you willing to help?

nevermind.

I just talked to our Oracle administrator…we won’t be doing any programming here.

Damn bureaucracy.