Resolving expression text errors
When writing your own calculations in Tedds for Word it is inevitable that sometimes you will type a calculation expression incorrectly which will result in TEDDS reporting an expression error. When TEDDS fails to calculate the expression it will prompt you with information about the error encountered, it will also show you the expression that caused the error with some suggestions for a possible solution.
Tedds includes an enhanced error reporting window which shows the expression in which the error occurred using an Expression Text control. This control includes several features which can help you to resolve errors.
Syntax Colouring
The Expression Text control uses colours to automatically highlight the text in an expression based on the syntax of the expression. Numbers are displayed in magenta, mathematical operators in blue and strings in green. In addition when you click the mouse to move the cursor to a location between parenthesis the control will colour the matching parenthesis in red, this is particularly useful when attempting to resolve mismatched parenthesis errors.
Formatted Text By default the error expression is shown using Expression Text Format (ETF), this formatting includes special sequences of characters which denote formatting such as superscript and subscript in a plain text format.
If you are not familiar with ETF it can make it difficult to interpret what may be wrong in the expression. The Expression Text control allows you to toggle the view to display either Expression Text or Formatted Text. To change how the text is displayed click the right mouse button on the expression and then click the last option on the context menu which will be either Formatted Text or Expression Text.