I want to split a multi-page MS Publisher 2010 document into a set of separate documents, one per page.
The starting document is from a mail-merge, and I am trying to produce a set of numbered and named tickets as PDFs to send to people for an event (this is for a charity). The mail-merge seems to work fine and I can save the merged document and it looks OK with e.g. a list of fifty people giving me a 50-page document.
Ideally the result would be a set of PDFs.
I have tried to create some simple VBA code to do this, but it is not working consistently. If I try this very simple macro below , I get the correct number of documents, but only perhaps 1 or 2 documents with the correct contents out of every five. Most of the documents are completely empty.
Sub splitter()
Dim i As Integer
Dim Source As Document
Dim Target As Document
Set Source = ActiveDocument
For i = 1 To Source.Pages.Count
Set Target = Documents.Add
Source.Pages(i).Shapes.Range.Copy
Target.Pages(1).Shapes.Paste
Target.SaveAs Filename:="C:\Temp\Ticket_" & i
Target.Close
Set Target = Nothing
Next i
End Sub
I did sometimes get an error that the clipboard is busy, but not always.
Another approach might be to start with the master document and do this looping over the separate documents and fill in the personal details for each person's ticket and directly produce the PDFs. But that seems more complex, and I am not a VB programmer (but been doing C++ etc for 20+ years, so I can program :-) )
A final annoyance is that it seems to keep opening a new Publisher window for each document. It takes a while to then close 50+ copies of publisher, and the laptop starts to crawl...
Please advise how best to get round these issues. I am probably missing something trivial, being a relative VB(A) newbie.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions
Try coding something like this:
Open Publisher application (CreateObject()?)
Open Publisher document (doc.Open(filename))
Store the total amount of pages in a global variable (doc.Pages.Count)
Close document (doc.Close())
Loop the following for each page
Copy the pub file and rename it to name & "page" & X
Open the new pub file
Remove all Pages except page X from the pub file
doc.Save()
doc.Close()
Copying files with VBA is easy, but copying pages in Publisher VBA is quite a hassle, so this should be easier to achieve
Related
Consider VBA for PowerPoint -
Is this a valid Presentations function call?
Presentations(".\directory\ppname.ppt")
Note that this will be called from within a PowerPoint presentation VBA, to open another one in a sub-directory.
The Microsoft Presentations examples (and most others) are not specific about the filename forms accepted, e.g. those using the ".", "..", "\" directives recognized in DOS scripts.
This seems to work with Powerpoint 2007.
As described in the comment, it takes a block of text (the TextRange), the starting position and length of file reference, also a LinkAddr. LinkAddr is essentially a DOS-style file reference, like "..\folder\ppfile.ppt".
The intention here is to launch another PowerPoint tool by invoking its show.ppt or show.ppsm file name. The file name can refer to some other directory using MSDOS file name stuff. I don't know whether it can span different machine platforms, but it seems to work within one Windows 10 system.
My difficulty in getting this to work was some full-path links to images, e.g. something like C:\blah\blah\image.jpg, in the Visual Basic code. PowerPoint didn't like these, instead asked about enabling macros, and just hung up when one of my file links were to be executed. By getting rid of the "macro" complaints, this suddenly started working.
Or maybe some bugs have been fixed in recent repairs to my 2007 PowerPoint tools??
Go figure...
Sub InsertLink(ByRef Trange As TextRange, fpos As Long, msglen As Long, LinkAddr As String)
' Insert an HTML link into the selected TextFrame.
' get the character range
Dim Hrange As TextRange
Set Hrange = Trange.Characters(Start:=fpos, length:=msglen)
' make it an HTML link
With Hrange.ActionSettings(ppMouseClick)
.Action = ppActionHyperlink
.Hyperlink.Address = LinkAddr
End With
End Sub
I am looking for mail merge alternatives in my vb.net app. I have used the mail merge feature of word, and find that it is quite buggy when dealing with a large volume of documents. I am looking at alternate methods of generating the merge, and have come across open xml. I think this will probably be the answer I am looking for. I have come to understand that the merge will be entirely code-driven in vb.net. I have started playing around with the following code:
Dim wordprocessingDocument As WordprocessingDocument = wordprocessingDocument.Open("C:\Users\JasonB\Documents\test.docx", True)
'for each simplefield (mergefield)
For Each field In wordprocessingDocument.MainDocumentPart.Document.Body.Descendants(Of SimpleField)()
'get the document instruction values
Dim instruction As String() = field.Instruction.Value.Split(splitChar, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
'if mergefield
If instruction(0).ToLower.Equals("mergefield") Then
Dim fieldname As String = instruction(1)
For Each fieldtext In field.Descendants(Of Text)()
fieldtext.Text = "I AM TESTING"
Next
End If
wordprocessingDocument.MainDocumentPart.Document.Save()
wordprocessingDocument.Dispose()
Now this works great and all, but I am realizing that I need to create as many documents as I will have datarows (assuming I use a datatable to handle the data).
One suggestion I found was to loop through each datarow, take my document template, save it to a folder and insert the datarow data. This could mean however that I end up with 12,000 documents in a single folder that need to be joined later and converted to pdf.
Is there another option? The other thing that stood out to me is to create a new word document, and duplicate over the xml from the template, and then replace the values. I dont know however if there is a "simpler" way of doing this, thanks.
If you don't want to save all 12,000 documents to file you should be able to process, convert and email them one at a time using temporary files.
Converting the DOCX to PDF in .NET might be an issue but looks like it's possible using Word Automation (Saving Word DOCX files as PDF).
The bottom line is you don't need to generate all documents before emailing them if you perform the process one document at a time. You can use SmtpClient in VB.NET to email the PDF after it is generated.
In terms of creating the document I have seen reports generated where a simple string replace is used to replace a string such as '%FIRSTNAME%' with the person's name and so on. This isn't necessarily the best approach but can work quite well. This way you can create your template in Word or OpenOffice and then edit it in .NET using OpenXML.
I have several hundred .doc word documents to which I need to add a macro which runs when the .doc file is opened and creates a header for said document based on the file name. Is there a way to do this as a batch? I have been individually opening each document and going into visual basic --> Project --> This Document then inserting a .txt file which contains the code. Is there a fast way to do this for multiple documents?
As a learning exercise, put this into the "ThisDocument" part of Normal (the Normal.dot template) in the VBE
Open a word document and watch what happens.
I don't think you need to put your code in every single file, I think you should be OK with using the Document_Open event in Normal.dot.
Just make sure it shows up as a reference in your word documents that you open but I don't see why it wouldn't
If you absolutely need it in every file then it can be done but the problem is if you make one small change to the code, you have to go through all this again. The idea with code is to write it once, use it many times.
You can write VBA code that alters the VBA code in other documents, but you need to "Trust access to the VBA project object model" in the Trust Centre options. This could open you up to viral code if you download Word documents with malicious VBA code in them. What you want to do, essentially, is write a VBA virus. There are legitimate reasons for doing this, and also malicious ones, I leave the ethics of the uses of these techniques up to the user. Knowledge itself is not malicious.
Here's the meat, you will need to write your own code to loop through the documents and possibly save them as .docm files.
Sub ReplaceCode()
Set oDoc = ActiveDocument
Set oComponents = oDoc.VBProject.VBComponents
For i = oComponents.Count To 1 Step -1
If oComponents(i).Type = 100 And oComponents(i).Name = "ThisDocument" Then
With oComponents(i).CodeModule
.DeleteLines 1, .CountOfLines
.AddFromFile "C:\ThisDocument.cls"
End With
End If
Next i
End Sub
Also, if you create your code file by exporting from VBA, you will need to remove this from the top of the .cls file:
VERSION 1.0 CLASS
BEGIN
MultiUse = -1 'True
END
Personally, I would drive this from Excel, maybe using a worksheet to hold a list of the files or locations to update, and another sheet for the code to populate with a list of files updated.
I have a VBA script used to process Word documents. The first thing the program does is to create an index of the documents in a defined set of folders. It then goes through the list processing each of the indexed documents.
The problem I am having is that it will sometimes decide that a particular document cannot be found, even though it previously indexed the document and a quick spot check shows the document to be in the correct place.
Can anyone shed some light on why VBA should display this behaviour?
The script is using the Dir$ function to index the files, and the Documents.Open function to open each word document for processing.
Sample code:
ChangeFileOpenDirectory (folderName)
inputFileName = Dir$(folderName & "*.doc")
Do While inputFileName <> ""
... call various functions here ...
inputFileName = Dir$
Loop
One of the functions called in the block has the following line:
Set currentDoc = Documents.Open(fileName:=docFileName, AddToRecentFiles:=False, Visible:=False)
This is the point at which the code is failing.
One of the most annoying things I have found is that recent files links are returned as the files themselves with Dir. You can use the FileSystemObject to check the file type.
I copy/paste your code and it works correctly.
However, it leaves all the files open (and hidden), and when you run it in another directory, additional files are opened and added to the open projects (take a look in the VBA editor).
My only guess is that after a while you're hitting the maximum allowable number of open files.
Try adding
currentdoc.Close
just before
inputFileName = Dir$
A few reasons, some duplicated from other answers:
If the path+ filename is long enough ... (you already answered in a comment)
If you are writing new files to same directory, Dir$ may get corrupted (happened to me)
If you have filenames with non-std chars (ex. "#")
Files locked by other processes
Files deleted while the macro is running
You may also try this code ...
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
If Not fso.FileExists(file) Then ....
First enable the Microsoft Scripting reference in the VBE
I have a folder with several excel files that have a date field, i.e. 08-24-2010-123320564.xls. I want to be able to have some VB scripting that will simply take the files that start with todays date and merge them into one file.
08-24-2010-123320564.xls
08-24-2010-123440735.xls
08-24-2010-131450342.xls
into
08-24-2010.xls
Can someone please help?
Thanks
GabrielVA
assuming you just want to append rows in simple spreadsheets, follow this logic:
Psuedocode
use an excel macro
(you could just as well automate excel from vb but why vbscript alone since you need excel anyway?)
have it to a dir listing (dir function)
dim a date_start variable init to "new"
dim a merged_spreadsheet as new doc default to nothing
loop thru result of dir
if date_start <> start of filename
if merged_spreadsheet is not nothing
save it
set it to nothing
store start of date (left mid function) in date_start
if merged_spreadsheet is nothing
make a new one
open the file from the dir command's loop
select all the data
copy it
go to first empty row in merged_spreadsheet
paste it
loop files
if merged_spreadsheet is not nothing
save it
If you're not happy with all those 'nothings', you can set a separate flag to keep track of whether you have a merged_spreadsheet or not. Think about what happens for just one file in a date, no files at all, etc.
Of course you will tear out your hair finding out how to automate those excel functions. The secret to turning 'hard' into 'pretty darn easy' is this:
macro recorder will reveal the automation commands
They are not intuitive. So record a macro. Then do things that you'll need to do in your code. Stop recording and look at the result.
For example:
* load/save files
* select only entered fields
* Select all
* copy / switch files / paste
* create new sheet
* click in various single cells and type (how to examine/set a cell's contents)
In summary-
(1) Know exactly the steps to what you're doing
(2) Use macro recorder to give away the secrets of the excel object model. Steal its secrets.
Really this won't be all that hard if you marry these two concepts cleverly. Since the macro will be vbscript (at least if you use office 97 ;-) you can probably run it from vbs or vb6 if you want. A hop to vb.net shouldn't be that hard either.
Aspose makes it pretty easy to work with excel-files in .NET http://www.aspose.com