Paste text into a Word Document with a specific format - vba

I'm working on a macro but I'm stuck at this point. I'm copying text from one word document to another, but I need this text to be pasted in a specific format, neither the source formatting, or it's destination's.
Is it possible to determine that the text I'll be pasting, gets pasted with a specific font, a specific size, and a specific color?

The easiest way to do this would be as follows:
Start recording a new macro.
Paste your text.
Select the pasted text.
Set the formatting (font, size, color) as you require.
Stop recording the macro.
Borrow heavily from the auto-generated selection and formatting code of the new macro for use in your original macro.

Related

Combining Rich Text Content Control Content in MS Word using VBA

I'm trying to create a form for a non-technical user in MS Word to capture some text content in MS Word. This word doc consists of several rich text content controls where the user will type in or paste in some formatted data (bold, underlined, links, ...).
Once they get all the content entered into these various content controls I'm trying to make it easy for them to combine them together to paste in a consistent order into some podcast show notes which is in an HTML form.
So basically, I want to take three rich text content controls that have formatted data in them, combine them together into one formatted piece of content, and then copy it to the clipboard so they can then go to this web form, paste it in, and do some minor cleanup. The problem is that whenever I try to combine the RTF content it loses the formatting.
The only way I seem to be able to keep the formatting is if I copy the range object and then paste it. However, this doesn't paste just the formatted text. It pastes the whole rich text content control.
I've tried creating a blank RTF field at the bottom of the Word doc to combine everything in but I just can't figure it out. I wouldn't think this would be rocket science.
Being none of the code I've tried works and keeps the formatting I"m not sure if posting it here will do any good. Here's how I'm getting the value of the text object:
ActiveDocument.SelectContentControlsByTitle("txtShowNotes").Item(1).Range.Text
tried this:
ActiveDocument.SelectContentControlsByTitle("txtShowNotes").Item(1).Range.Copy
ActiveDocument.SelectContentControlsByTitle("txtCombinedContentSection").Item(1).Range.Paste
but this copies the whole RTF and not just the text.
Try something based on:
Sub Demo()
Dim Rng As Range
With ActiveDocument
Set Rng = .SelectContentControlsByTitle("txtCombinedContentSection").Item(1).Range
Rng.FormattedText = _
.SelectContentControlsByTitle("txtShowNotes").Item(1).Range.FormattedText
Rng.InsertAfter vbCr & vbCr
Rng.Characters.Last.FormattedText = _
.SelectContentControlsByTitle("txtShowNotes").Item(2).Range.FormattedText
End With
End Sub

VBA: Copy whole word document to excel

I´m trying to simply copy whole word document into excel and keep the source formatting (and images).
Assuming both documents are open.
I tried this code:
Sheets("Nabídka").Range("A" & 87) = Documents("K4E pila.docx").Range.Text
but it only copies the text without formatting and images. Is there a similar command which includes the formatting?
Even If I copy/paste from word to excel (ctrl+c) the formatting is ruined --> The image overlaps the text.
This is the first step I need to figure out to proceed in my project. The outcome should be: Copy all word documents into excel if the name of the word document matches some excel cells values.
Thanks in advance for any help!

VBA code to clear FORMATTING and leave plain text data in a chosen column in Excel

I need to create a button to add to Excel (2010 currently) that will strip all the formatting in that column and just leave plain text. Our current solution is to copy the data into Notepad to strip out the formatting and then copy it back in from Notepad. This works, but is inelegant and would be far easier if I could just create a button to do this within Excel itself. I've seen a few solutions posted but none of them seem to deal with a randomly selected column. Help!
The Range.ClearFormats method seems appropriate here.
With Worksheets("Sheet1")
.Columns(1).ClearFormats 'clear formatting from column A
End With
'for a manually selected group of cells
Selection.ClearFormats 'clear formatting from the cells currently selected
fwiw, the Clear Formats command is available on the ribbon through Home ► Editing ► Clear ► Clear Formats (Alt+H+E+F). You could easily add that command to the QAT rather than create a macro that largely duplicates the command and assign it to a custom button.
Excel already has a button on the Home tab:
Just select the entire column and click Clear Formats
Just to add to Jeeped's answer:
Using this code you'll clear the whole columns formatting (select a random cell, run this code and the whole columns formatting has been cleared)
Sub ClearColumn()
i = ActiveCell.Column
ActiveSheet.Columns(i).ClearFormats
End Sub

format numbers in text box in ppt via vba

I have connected Excel and Powerpoint via VBA to send values from the Excel sheet to the PPT.
All is working well except one thing: I need to transfer values from cells in Excel to text box shapes in ppt while preserving the number formatting from excel. How do I do that?
I do this for about 10 such boxes and my current code using copy from excel and paste in powerpoint, keeps on giving out of range error on random places.
Will paste the code I am using in a short while.
Try using the numberFormat from Excel when you bring over the Value.
Example:
With Workbooks(1).Sheets(1).Range("A1")
valueToPaste = Format(.Value, .NumberFormat)
End With
For the sake of the example, I'm pretending you are calling this from Excel and only want to know how to extract the value with it's format. We are using the first sheet of the first workbook in Range A1. It should be easy enough to update to your specific needs.
There are probably some exceptions, particularly for custom formats, but this should work for the majority of formats you would use in Excel.

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