Beginning in build 2102 of MS Word, a very elaborate document that I have created no longer works properly.
My form makes extensive use of FormFields. Starting with build 2102, it appears that Word VBA is not able to properly execute this command:
ActiveDocument.FormFields("MyFieldNameA1").Result = 100
if the field in question has fill-in enabled set to off. It instead changes another, seemingly random field in the document.
There is no way that this is intended behavior.
You can work around this via:
ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("MyFieldNameA1").Range.Fields(1).Result.Text = 100
This is a long-standing approach to programmatically inserting strings longer than 255 characters into formfields. Works just as well with shorter strings.
Build 13801.20808 of version 2102 Word is affected, however this was fixed by Microsoft in at least build 13801.20960. Just for documentation as I just came across this problem.
Related
Existing VBA add-ins have started to fall over on this line if the filepath is longer than 126 characters. Shorter file paths are not an option, unfortunately.
Set ImageControl.Picture = LoadPicture (FilepathLongerThan126CharsErrors)
Runtime Error '75' (File/Path access error)
The error does not occur if the file path is shortened to 125 characters.
We tried to set the RegKey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled to (1) but to no avail.
Machines that have not yet had the Windows 10 1903 update don't seem to be affected. The problem occurs mainly on Surface Laptops so far but also a few other PCs.
Possible workarounds are listed below:
You may copy existing images into the AppData subfolder to make a path shortened.
Use the ShortPath property which returns the short path used by programs that require the earlier 8.3 file naming convention.
Yes, thank you Tim and Eugene. I am now working with the 'ShortPath'.
However, the problem is still that the behaviour of this method has changed with the Windows 1903 update (from allowing 260 characters to now 126). There must be quite a few people out there scratching their heads why their codes are failing seemingly at random.
Thanks anyway. I'll put an error trap to feed the ShortPath through when needed.
I would like to determine the Thousand Separator used while running a VBA Code on a target machine without resolving to calling system built-in functions such as (Separator = Application.ThousandsSeparator).
I am using the following simple code using 'Format':
ThousandSeparator = Mid(Format(1000, "#,#"), 2, 1)
The above seems to work fine, and would like to confirm if this is a safe method of doing it without resorting to system calls.
I would expect the result to be a single char string in the form of , or . or ' or a Space as applicable to the locale on the machine.
Please note that I want to only use a language statement such as Format or similar (no sys calls). Also this relates to Thousands Separator not Decimal Separator. This article Using VBA to detect which decimal sign the computer is using does not help or answer my question. Thanks
Thanks in advance.
The strict answer to whether it is safe to use Format to get the thousands separator is No.
E.g. on Windows, it is possible to enter up to three characters into the Thousands Separator field in the regional settings in the control panel.
Suppose you enter asd and click OK.
If you now call Format(1000, "#,#") it will give you 1a000. That is only the first letter of your thousands separator. You have failed to retrieve it correctly.
Reading the registry:
? CreateObject("WScript.Shell").RegRead("HKCU\Control Panel\International\sThousand")
you get back asd in full.
To be fair, the Excel international properties do not seem to be of much help either. Application.International(xlThousandsSeparator) in this situation will return the separator originally defined in your computer's locale, not the value you've overridden it to.
Having that said, the practical answer is Yes, because it would appear (and if you happen to know for sure, please post an answer here) that there is no culture with multi-char thousand separator (even in China where scary things like 1億2345万6789 or 1億2345萬6789 exist, they happen to be represented with just one UTF-16 character), and you probably are happy to ignore the people who decided to play with their locale settings in that fashion.
I'm writing a macro for LibreOffice Calc in Basic in VBA compatibility mode. It complains when I use this line:
Const BASE = 3
BASIC syntax error.
Symbol expected.
and the syntax coloring seems to indicate that "BASE" is a keyword or reserved word. Other consts in the macro are accepted without issue. Also, this line is accepted in VBA in Excel.
I will change the name in order to avoid this problem, however I am unable to locate any documentation that references this as being any kind of reserved word. I assume it either has something to do with number bases or with the name of LO's database. However, words like "WRITER" and "CALC" don't act the same way - they seem to be accepted as names for constants. Note that my use of this word is not related to the database anyway.
Also, unfortunately, LO Basic doesn't seem to have an immediate mode (REPL) so I am unable to easily play with this word to determine what it's used for.
Can you point me toward some documentation for the keyword BASE?
Those are some good guesses, but incorrect as it turns out. The word is used as follows:
Option Base 1
It can be either 0 or 1 to denote which index refers to the first element of an array, as documented at https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/G11ntest/Documentation/BASIC_Guide/Arrays.
To discover this, I looked through the LibreOffice source code. The file /basic/source/inc/parser.hxx was helpful. This is the closest approximation of a list of keywords available, judging from this post.
Apparently, this statement was adopted from VBA: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/language/reference/user-interface-help/option-base-statement
According to MSDN vb.net uses this extended character set. In my experience it actually uses this:
What am I missing? Why does it say it uses the one and uses the other?
Am I doing something wrong?
Is there some sort of conversion tool to the original character set?
This behaviour is defined in the documentation of the Chr command:
The returned value depends on the code page for the current thread, which is contained in the ANSICodePage property of the TextInfo class in the System.Globalization namespace. You can obtain ANSICodePage by specifying System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage.
So, the output of Chr for values greater than 127 is system-dependent. If you want reproducible results, create the desired instance of Encoding by calling Encoding.GetEncoding(String), then use Encoding.GetChars(Byte()) to convert your numeric values into characters.
If you go up one level in the chart linked in your question, you will see that they do not claim that this chart is always the output of the Chr command:
The characters that appear in Windows above 127 depend on the selected typeface.
The charts in this section show the default character set for a console application.
Your application is a WinForm application, not a console application. Even in the console, the character set used can be changed (for example, by using the chcp command), hence the word "default".
For detailed information about the encodings used in .net, I recommend the following MSDN article: Character Encoding in the .NET Framework.
The first character set is Code Page 437 (CP437), the second looks like Code Page 1252 (CP1252) also known as Windows Latin-1.
I'd guess VB.Net is simply picking up the default encoding for the PC.
How did you write all this? Because usually, when you use a output stream function, you can specify the encoding going with it.
Edit: I know this is not C#, but you can see the idea...
You'd have to set the encoding of your filestream, by doing something like this:
Setting the encoding when creating the filestream
I set the culture to Hungarian language, and Chr() seems to be broken.
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = "hu-US"
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = "hu-US"
Chr(254)
This returns "ţ" when it should be "þ"
However, Asc("ţ") returns 116.
This: Asc(Chr(254)) returns 116.
Why would Asc() and Chr() be different?
I checked and the 'wide' functions do work correctly: ascw(chrw(254)) = 254
Chr(254) interprets the argument in a system dependent way, by looking at the System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage property. See the MSDN article about Chr. You can check whether that value is what you expect. "hu-US" (the hungarian locale as used in the US) might do something strange there.
As a side-note, Asc() has no promise about the used codepage in its current documentation (it was there until 3.0).
Generally I would stick to the unicode variants (ending on -W) if at all possible or use the Encoding class to explicitly specify the conversions.
My best guess is that your Windows tries to represent Chr(254)="ţ" as a combined letter, where the first letter is Chr(116)="t" and the second ("¸" or something like that) cannot be returned because Chr() only returns one letter.
Unicode text should not be handled character-by-character.
It sounds like you need to set the code page for the current thread -- the current culture shouldn't have any effect on Asc and Chr.
Both the Chr docs and the Asc docs have this line:
The returned character depends on the code page for the current thread, which is contained in the ANSICodePage property of the TextInfo class. TextInfo.ANSICodePage can be obtained by specifying System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage.
I have seen several problems in VBA on the Mac where characters over 127 and some control characters are not treated properly.
This includes paragraph marks (especially in text copied from the internet or scanned), "¥", and "Ω".
They cannot always be searched for, cannot be used in file names - though they could in the past, and when tested, come up as another ascii number. I have had to write algorithms to change these when files open, as they often look like they are the right character, but then crash some of my macros when they act strangely. The character will look and act right when I save the file, but may be changed when it is reopened.
I will eventually try to switch to unicode, but I am not sure if that will help this issue.
This may not be the issue that you are observing, but I would not rule out isolated problems with certain characters like this. I have sent notes to MS about this in the past but have received no joy.
If you cannot find another solution and the character looks correct when you type it in, then I recommend using a macro snippet like the one below, which I run when updating tables. You of course have to setup theRange as the area you are looking at. A whole file can take a while.
For aChar = 1 To theRange.Characters.count
theRange.Characters(aChar).Select
If Asc(Selection.Text) = 95 And Selection.Text <> "_" Then Selection.TypeText "Ω"
Next aChar