Writing Word Macros, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Introduction

In this chapter:

• Program Example: Creating Tables

• Program Example: Shortcut Key Assignments

• Program Example: User Interaction

• Elements of Word VBA Programming

Microsoft Word is a word processor of enormous power and flexibility. But despite its powerful feature set, there is a great deal that Word either does not allow you to do or does not allow you to do easily through its user interface. In these cases, we must turn to Word programming.

Let me give you two examples. I can assure you that these are real-life examples, because they happened to me.

In writing this book, I was faced with the problem of turning long columns of words into tables. Word’s built-in ConvertToTable command was not flexible enough for my needs for three reasons.

First, I wanted the items to be placed in the table in column-major order (the first column is filled first) rather than in row-major order (the first row is filled first). Second, I wanted to choose the number of columns based on the number of words (cells), so I needed to know the word count before I made the choice of the number of columns. Finally, I wanted a row at the top of the table for a title.

To illustrate, I wanted to be able to select the following column of words:

Border

Cell

Column

Document

Font

Options

PageSetup

Paragraph

ParagraphFormat

Range

Row

Selection

Style

Table

Template

Window

and be presented with a dialog box similar to the one shown in Figure 1-1. Then, if I entered 3 for the number of columns and hit the OK button, ...