Pasting HTML into Word using VBA - vba

I need to paste 6000 HTML strings into Word as formatted using VBA. I can do this if I insert an HTML file, but would rather do this with passing a string.
This is the sample HTML I'm using:
<html><body>normal <b>bold</b><br></body></html>
I can get this to work:
Selection.InsertFile FileName:="html test file.htm"
Result: normal bold (this is what I want).
But not this (with the above HTML in the clipboard):
ActiveDocument.Range.PasteSpecial ,,,,WdPasteDataType.wdPasteHTML
With the later, I get error 5342 "the specified data type is unavailable".
In a perfect world, I can just pass a string.
In an imperfect world, I can copy the HTML to the clipboard, then copy the clipboard into Word.
In a sucky world, I can write the HTML to a text file, then insert that file into Word (repeat 6000 times).
Even though this is a one off project, I'd rather learn the efficient way to do this, so any help would be appreciated.
In case it's not clear, this is raw HTML from a database, not copying an already formatted page.
Thanks in advance.

The code posted by GMCB (accepted answer) here will do what you want, based on some short testing:
Injecting RTF code in the Clipboard to paste into MS Word as RTF text via a VBA macro
The main focus of that post is putting RTF-format text into the clipboard, but it also covers populating HTML-format.

Related

How to insert code in Word, export to pdf, and keep formatting?

I've written some Python code for my thesis, and wish to add this to my report in Word. I have to hand it in in pdf format. But when I convert the word document, the code cannot be copy pasted and used again, as the tabs are replaced by a single space.
Is there any solution for this?
found the answer: replace all spaces by _ , and possibly make them invisible (white).
If you want to copy paste and use the code, just replace all _ by spaces again.
Solved!

Unable to extract and re-insert MS Word Content Control using VBA and InsertXML

This question is related to my other question: Range.InsertXML using Transform
In MS Word it is easy to insert a content control using VBA, for example:
ThisDocument.ContentControls.Add wdContentControlRichText, Selection.Range
I've recently started exploring more in the XML side of things, e.g.:
Debug.Print ThisDocument.Range.XML seems to (or actually does) produce the XML for a Word document. However, if I create a NEW, BLANK document and add a Content Control I am unable to extract and reinsert the Content Control (oCC).
My steps:
added 2 blank paragraphs to a new document
added oCC to the 2nd paragraph
selected the oCC paragraph
immediate window: thisdocument.Paragraphs(1).Range.InsertXML selection.Range.XML
At first glance it LOOKS like the Content Control was duplicated, BUT on closer inspection, it was deleted and only the formatted text remains (see image, top paragraph is actually just formatted text).
Thinking I could out smart MS Word I set the properties of the Content Control to '...can not be deleted', but that didn't help.
I've also tried to insert into a separate document in case the issue had something to do with duplication of something that ought to have been unique.
In a nutshell:
To answer this question I need a way to insert a Content Control to a document using a combination of VBA and XML (or confirmation that what I am attempting is not possible).
Just realized I should use Selection.Range.WordOpenXML instead of Selection.Range.XML

vb parse word from clipboard into html

I want to copy some word text with tables, links and images and paste it into a rich textbox in my vb project. Where I want to parse it to html.
The Questenion is, how can access the copied word in the clipboard. Using
My.Computer.Clipboard.GetText()
just returns text, without the structure for links, tables or images. But there have to be a way to access it, because my rich textbox seems to know the word format. When I paste it into it, tables, images and links are also displayed in there.
You can try to specify text format in GetText's parameter as follow :
Dim htmlText As String = Clipboard.GetText(TextDataFormat.Html)

outlook 2007 - is there a way to get the formatted text from an Appointmentitem?

I'm trying to get the formatted text of the appointment item, I've searched everywhere and most places suggest getting the word document of the appointment item :
Word.Document wd = (Word.Document) (item as Outlook.AppointmentItem).GetInspector.WordEditor;
So I do that and I get the word document. But no where does it tell you what to actually do with this word document once you get it. How do I get the formatted text from the word document now?
UPDATE:
To anyone else searching for this answer in the future. I figured out how to do this in ol2007
1) First have have to get the word document from the appoint item via the WordEditor variable.
2) Then you have to use the select and copy functions from the word document to copy the RTF text into your clipboard.
3) make a richtextbox and use the richtextboc paste function to paste whats in the clipboard into your richtextbox.
4) now from the richtextbox you can access the .Rtf function which will now give you the RTF of the appointmentItem.
From my searching this method is the easiest way but you have to take over the clipboard which isn't ideal. There is a second way that I read about that is to save the word document in step 1 into an actually RTF file on your computer and then read in that RTF file.
and third way I suppose to do it would be to parse out the word document in step 1 using the Range.FormattedText function.
UPDATE: To anyone else searching for this answer in the future. I figured out how to do this in ol2007
1) First have have to get the word document from the appoint item via the WordEditor variable.
2) Then you have to use the select and copy functions from the word document to copy the RTF text into your clipboard.
3) make a richtextbox and use the richtextboc paste function to paste whats in the clipboard into your richtextbox.
4) now from the richtextbox you can access the .Rtf function which will now give you the RTF of the appointmentItem.
From my searching this method is the easiest way but you have to take over the clipboard which isn't ideal. There is a second way that I read about that is to save the word document in step 1 into an actually RTF file on your computer and then read in that RTF file.
and third way I suppose to do it would be to parse out the word document in step 1 using the Range.FormattedText function.

Convert text to image in Microsoft Word

I have a large book written in Microsoft Word and want to create a macro that will find all text using a predefined style and convert that text to an inline image. This text will be in Arabic and generally no longer than 4-5 lines. Is this possible?
UPDATE: Here's an example to show what I'm referring to:
I want to replace that entire line in Arabic with an image (as if I cropped this attached image to only include the Arabic and then replaced the line in Arabic with the image).
The reason I want a macro or script to do this is because there are hundreds of such lines and updating them one by one is cumbersome plus that will make modifications difficult later on.
UPDATE2: I found an interesting option here: http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/31344-Convert-Text-to-an-Image-of-Text-in-VBA-(Office-2000-Sr1a)
It looks like you can cut a piece of text and then "Paste Special" as an image. So if there's a way to automate that that might work.
This is not an answer although I hope it will grow into a community answer. At the moment it is an exploration of what is required to solve the problem.
I know from the discussion when this question was posted on Super User that Abdullah wishes to publish his book on Kindle. So the question is really about how to get a document in English and Arabic ready for publication as an e-Book.
The Kindle does not support Arabic. The number of languages it does support is slowly increasing but there is no evidence I can find that Amazon has plans to add Arabic in the foreseeable future.
The format behind an Amazon e-Book is a cut down version of HTML. If a Word document containing Arabic letters is exported to HTML, the Arabic letters are included as character entities; for example: “ﭐ &#amp;64337; ﭒ ﭓ”. Importing the original Word or the HTML version to Kindle, results in the leading bits being discarded so these characters are displayed as P, Q, R and S instead of “ﭐ ﭑ ﭒ ﭓ (Alef Wasla isolated form, Alef Wasla final form, Beeh Wasla isolated form and Beeh Wasla final form).
I have tried Abdullah’s idea of saving some Arabic letters in a PNG file and creating an HTML file containing <p> … </p> <img src= “Arabic.png” > <p> … </p>. The appearance of this file on my Kindle 2 is perfectly acceptable so this has the potential to be a solution. The question is: how can the necessary conversions be performed?
We need to extract each Arabic string from either the Word document or its HTML equivalent and import it into a program that can convert them to PNG files.
The only way that I know of automating this would be to copy each string to a slide within PowerPoint. With PowerPoint’s SaveAs option it is possible to save each slide as a separate PNG file. The slides are named: SLIDE1.PNG, SLIDE2.PNG, SLIDE3.PNG and so on in sequence which would allow a macro to relate the results to the original strings. It would then be possible to replace the Arabic strings in the HTML file with the image elements. None of this would be too difficult to automate but there is a problem with the slides all being the size of the PowerPoint page. The page could be made smallish but what we need is for each slide to be cropped to just bigger than that slide’s text. I cannot think of any way of automating this cropping.
Does anyone have a better approach than converting each Arabic phrase to a PNG file?
I have been looking for PNG editors with some sort of command line interface but can find nothing that would be easier than using PowerPoint. Does anyone know of an alternative to PowerPoint?
Does anyone have any suggestions for automating the cropping of each image? When a string is placed in a PowerPoint slide it is possible to set its width to, say, 6.5cm (which looks good on my Kindle) and get the height determined by PowerPoint. This could be saved for later use if anyone knows how to use it.
Implementing solution
Pending any suggestions for improving the approach described above, the following outlines how I would implement it.
I would not attempt to process the Word document. I would save it as a Web Page, Filtered HTML file, which is a required step on the way to creating a Kindle eBook, and process that.
Within the HTML file created from my test document, the Arabic phrase comes out as:
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span dir="RTL"
style="font-size:24.0pt;font-family:Arial">
&#64336;&#64337;&#64338;&#64339;&#64340;&#64341;
&#64342;&#64343;&#65153;&#65154;&#65276;&#65275;
&#65274;&#65273;&#65246;&#65226;&#65227;&#65228;
</span><span style="font-size:24.0pt"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
I assume Abdullah's document will result in something similar. Note 1: the above is a random collection of Arabic letters. Note 2: they are held left-to-right in reading sequence even though, when displayed or printed, they are read right-to-left.
The whole of this block will have to be replaced with something like:
<br><imc src="xxxx.png"><br>
where the file xxxx.png holds an image of the Arabic text.
The file names, such as xxxx.png, could be systematic (A001.png, A002.png, ...) but I would have thought that transliterating the first ten or twenty characters of the phrase from the Arabic to English alphabets and using the result, with a numeric suffix, as the file name would be more convenient.
I would hold the records necessary to manage the process in an Excel worksheet. I would place the VBA code in the same workbook.
The steps in the conversion process that I envisage are:
VBA macro to extract Arabic strings from latest HTML file and add new strings to the Excel worksheet. (More about the Excel worksheet later.)
VBA macro to create PowerPoint file, with one slide per new string, and use SaveAs in PNG format to create one PNG file per slide before discarding the PowerPoint file.
Human to crop each PNG file. (There appears to be no way of automating the cropping so this task will be minimised by use of data in the Excel worksheet.)
VBA macro to rename each slide from SLIDEnnn.PNG to its permanent name and to record the permanent name in the Excel worksheet.
VBA macro to update the latest HTML file by replacing the block containing the Arabic phrase with the appropriate HTML IMG element.
The Excel worksheet needs two columns: Arabic phrase and PNG file name. If there is any risk of the worksheet being sorted between steps 2 and 4, we may need a sequence number as well.
Macro 1 will extract an Arabic phrase from the HTML file, look down the list in the worksheet for this phrase and add the phrase at the bottom if it is not already present.
Macro 2 will look for phrases in the worksheet that do not have a PNG file name. These new phrases are the ones to be written to the PowerPoint presentation. That is, a phrase only goes into this process once.
Task 3, cropping each PNG file, will be a pain. All I can say is that it will only be once per phrase.
Macro 4 will assume that the SLIDE001.PNG, SLIDE002.PNG, … are in the sequence of phrases without PNG files in the worksheet. If this might not be true (because the worksheet has been sorted) we will either need a sequence number or to retain the PowerPoint file. The macro will assign a unique name to each new phrase, record this name in the worksheet and rename the PNG file.
Macro 5 creates a new copy of the latest HTML file using the contents of the worksheet to determine which phrase to replace with which PNG file.
This process is not ideal but it will achieve the desired result and has no obvious complications. Any suggestions for improving it?
Before you begin these instructions, press record in the Microsoft Word macro editor, so you can see what the VBA code is.
I'm wondering if this will be easier if you convert the docx file to .rtf (rich text format) and replace that line with an image? Go to File > Save As.. > name it "old.rtf", then replace the line with an image and Save As.. again and name it "new.rtf" and then download Beyond Compare or your favorite diff program to see what happened. It should be easy to do this pro-grammatically if you choose to. I think working in text would be easier than Microsoft's binary format unless you can find a good library to modify their doc or docx formats.
Sub CopySelPasteAsPicture()
' Take a picture of a selection and paste it at the
' document end
With Selection
.CopyAsPicture
End With
ActiveDocument.Content.Select
With Selection
.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
.TypeParagraph
.TypeParagraph
.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteMetafilePicture
End With
End Sub