Abbreviations: States, Months Macro

This macro can change a state name into one of two standard abbreviations (Associated Press or Postal) and back to the full state name. It can also change a month's name to its abbreviation or numeric representation (and back again).

It uses the F2 key for the full name, Control-F2 for the AP or standard abbreviations and Option-F2 for the Postal abbreviation and numeric representations.

To use it, just select the name or abbreviation and press the hot key trigger for the result you want.

Abbreviations- States- Months.kmmacros (10 KB)

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Thanks for sharing a really useful macro. :+1:

I just noticed that you put it in a restricted Macro Group, So it might not be available for some other text-based app. My preference for a macro like this is to put it into a Global Macro Group.

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My pleasure. I need both state and month transformations in my own work and find this very helpful.

Good point. But I did that for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it's my working macro, not a version made for sharing.

The second is that it uses a function key (and modifiers) as a trigger, so I want to restrict it to text editing applications to avoid function key conflicts.

My convention is to use some function keys globally but keep other specific to applications. F1 in any application, for example, will display a palette of macros for that application. So F1 provides the same function in every application but is also quite different in every application.

By restricting this macro to text editing applications, F2 is free to use in non-text editing applications.

You're right that if you use a text editing application not on my list, you may be wondering why this macro doesn't work. But I felt it was more important to restrict its scope. Of course it isn't possible to include all possible text-editing applications (because I don't have all of them) but its easy to include any that aren't in the list.

Which, BTW, is not quite as restrictive as it looks. It works in InDesign 2020, although that version isn't listed.

I take your point. One option is to exclude the apps that you do NOT want to use this macro for. In my case, I have a much smaller exclusion list that I do inclusion list of apps. Almost every app I have has some text interface, although very few would I expect to need this macro. But one never knows for sure. :wink:

Tiny revision to break out of the loop on first match to avoid a problem with Virginia.

Abbreviations: States, Months Macro (v9.0.5)

Abbreviations- States- Months.kmmacros (10 KB)