10/19/2021 0 Comments Add Developer Tool In Word For Mac
Make and share beautiful PowerPoint timelines online.For more than six years, we’ve supported Grammarly’s add-in for Word and Outlook on Windows. Get the richness of a desktop tool with Office Timelines PowerPoint add-in. Easily produce elegant timelines, Gantt charts, program roadmaps, and portfolio slides that no other application can match. Try the only timeline maker built for professionals, right inside Microsoft PowerPoint.Cursors can then be controlled together.The path to get there was not always straightforward or direct. Ctrl + click or middle-mouse click will place another cursor in the place thats clicked. Ctrl + d will select the current word and each time the command is repeated, it adds the next occurrence of the word to the selection. That's so long ago that Microsoft was actually making the best software fortheplatform inthe formof Microsoft Word.Multiple cursors and column selection allows for versatile ways of editing. There were many roadblocks to making this happen at the quality we expect for all of our offerings—but we were finally able to release Grammarly for Microsoft Word on Mac in beta at the end of 2019, followed by a full release in March 2020.Mac I've been usingtheMac OSsince 1987.That changed when Microsoft introduced the Office add-in API, which is based on JavaScript and works across all devices as well as online in the browser. We didn’t want to start a new project on old tech, but for a while the only option was to build the add-in with Visual Basic Script. Under Customize the Ribbon and under Main Tabs, select the Developer check box.Year after year, we’ve been evaluating this project. On the File tab, go to Options > Customize Ribbon. Building a proof of conceptShow the developer tab in Word.
The pop-up editor works wonderfully in that circumstance. The first was to build a pop-up editor, similar to what we have for the Grammarly browser extension. We had to choose between two different directions. We could do better.The second option we considered was putting Grammarly’s suggestions directly in the Word sidebar while underlining the corresponding text in the document. People who write in Word are often doing so because they’re very familiar and comfortable with that writing tool, so taking them outside of the application to review writing suggestions led to a subpar user experience. Using the pop-up editor means being taken momentarily away from the screen where you’re writing. Clicking on it lets the user open or close the application in the sidebar:Access text and get textChanged events □Grammarly’s writing assistant reviews text as it’s being written to offer suggestions in real-time. While Grammarly is running, we can show badges in the navigation bar that update with real-time stats about the document:Here is the ribbon in Word on Mac, where the Grammarly icon is static. Grammarly’s add-in for Word on Windows supports this with the COM API, but when using the new JavaScript API for Mac, we unfortunately could only render a static icon.Here is the ribbon in Word on Windows, where the Grammarly icon is dynamic. We wanted to be able to add badging to the Grammarly icon in the ribbon and update the user with the number of alerts in their document. Add Developer Tool In Word How To Use TheFor example, search(`?`) will return the first 40 characters in the text.To better illustrate, below is some sample code for how we find ranges.Here’s the helper function to find a range from the beginning of the text to a certain position:Here’s the function to find the range given a starting and ending position:Here’s an example of how to use the findRange function, which returns the text of the range:This workaround gave us the results we needed, but the API design still led us to experience some performance issues (we will discuss these in more detail later on). Our solution was to retrieve paragraphs from the document and then use the search API function with wildcards, a form of simplified regular expressions supported by Word. While the JavaScript API provides some limited ways to access the text, it does not expose a way to get a range with specific start and end points. For example, in the text "This is a test", delineating range(start: 5, end: 7) will give you the word "is".Grammarly needs the range function to find the position in the text for a suggestion and to update the text when the user accepts the suggestion. A range is a section of text delineated by start and end points measured in characters. This doesn’t exist in the COM API on Windows, either, so it was a problem we already had some experience solving by polling the text.The bigger issue we had to work around involved accessing ranges. Get range’s vertical coordinate □From a UX perspective, it would be nice to be able to align our suggestions with the corresponding piece of text in the document—that way a user would see them directly side by side. Thankfully, the API supports a range.select function and we were able to make this possible—another success. This means that we need to move the user’s cursor to that range of text when they click. Stat plus mac torrentOn Windows, we are able to add custom underlines that are not applied to the actual document. We typically indicate where Grammarly’s suggestions are in the text by underlining the relevant parts of the text. Underline range □Probably the most disappointing limitation we encountered was regarding underlining text. Unfortunately, while the COM API for Word on Windows supports this, the JavaScript add-in API for Mac does not—and there is no workaround. So the underlines we might apply to a text to alert users to Grammarly suggestions could inadvertently get saved with the document—and nobody wants to have a bunch of saved underlines in what they’re writing!With no other option, we decided to avoid underlining and instead try highlighting the corresponding text when the user clicks on a Grammarly suggestion in the sidebar. Microsoft Word is evolving toward no longer relying on save functionality—instead the document is being constantly updated in the cloud. But we quickly realized that this would be much too dangerous for users. We can change the formatting of a range of text, but that formatting change will be saved in the document itself, which is not what we want to do for our writing assistant.For a brief moment, we considered adding a toggle in the sidebar for a user to click Remove Underlines or Add Underlines. Performance issues and other caveatsYou may recall from our discussion of the textChanged issue that we are using search several times to retrieve a range of text. Thankfully, the API does allow for this for Word using the range.insertText function. Change the text for a range □Finally, for cases in which a suggestion is accepted, there needs to be a way for Grammarly to access the text and update it. We’ve found that when we are hitting Word with multiple API calls at once, we run into lags of up to 500 milliseconds (and sometimes more). Accessing a range of text takes multiple API calls, and we are often retrieving the range multiple times to perform what the user would think of as a single operation. If we call search, Word doesn’t return the result immediately because it doesn’t want to lock the UI. Once a user clicks on a card or accepts a suggestion, we stop text polling (which may be in progress or might not have started yet), perform the necessary API calls to complete the user’s operation, and then resume text polling.Since we’re using the search API so often, we found some nuanced issues. To handle this, we have implemented cancellable text polling. But when we’re polling the text and making a call to the API at the same time, we end up with poor performance. As the API doesn’t expose a way to know when the document has changed, we need to continually poll the text and check for updates. Thankfully, there is an API function to detect whether a paragraph contains hyperlinks or images.
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