Part 0: Welcome

I’m Erica Ingram. I’m the owner of A Quo Co., a court transcription service, and I want to share my VBA/Office tips to help legal professionals do more with ever-increasing demands on their time.

I’ll be posting once or twice a week. This blog will be *a little* more informal than you may know of me in a professional setting, but not much.

We’re going to start out with some basics, talk about some transcription-related things, and then dive in to the ‘juicy’ stuff. I hope to cover, in general, the following subjects:

  • variables
  • operators/math
  • DAO recordsets
  • loops
  • if/else statements
  • MySQL syntax and resources
  • using VBA with JSON

Then I’ll talk a little about how shorthand can help you produce and how to analyze what you type so that you can be effective at developing a shorthand dictionary you will remember:

  • shorthand
  • find/replaces in VBA/Word (this is a big one)

Then we’ll get into some of this fun stuff and more:

  • how to manually construct tables of content and authority
  • auto-generate Outlook tasks/appointments
  • automated availability calculator in Access
  • automated rate calculator in Access
  • automate header/footer generation in Word
  • automate e-mail generation, sending, and receiving
  • automatically generate OneNote notebooks, section groups, sections, and pages
  • working with building blocks in Word
  • build your own invoicing system
  • automatically generate tables of content
  • working with authorities in Word
  • auto-hyperlinking in Word
  • automatically generate tables of authority
  • word indexes
  • automate generating autocorrect entries
  • automatically generating Wunderlist tasks and lists
  • automating scanning or printing
  • tracking document history for a case
  • automating Cortana commands
  • building speech recognition
example of a form in my database that shows transcription shortcuts exportable to Word AutoCorrect.
This is a real form in my database with the sensitive stuff redacted. The button labeled ‘Export to AutoCorrect’ exports those shortcuts you see to my Word Autocorrect and I’m going to teach you how you can do this, too.

So check back soon and I’ll have another post up in a few days! Thanks for reading.

Published by Erica L. Ingram

Having produced court transcripts for a decade, I understand how complex practitioners' needs are when it comes to crafting legal documents. If you're a solo practitioner or professional services provider, your time is sliced thin and I can help you alleviate that. To accomplish that, I'll be posting helpful hints and how-tos here on how to use VBA in Office to really stand out at work and do more with less (effort).