FileDialog in Word 2011 VBA - vba

Question

I'm hoping for a bit of a sanity check. I'm adapting a Word add-in (written in VBA for Word 2010) for Mac, specifically, at this point, Word 2011. I'm aware of many of the differences, but one that I haven't been able to find much documentation on is the apparent lack of FileDialog. The closest I've come to an answer is here: http://www.rondebruin.nl/mac.htm where the author uses Application.GetOpenFilename. That method doesn't seem to exist for Word, though (the focus of that site is Excel).
Does anyone know how to use the file and folder picker dialogs that FileDialog makes available? I'm not familiar with Applescript, really, but I've had to learn a little in order to get around Word 2011's funky file management issues (Dir, FileCopy, etc.). So, if that's the answer, any sense of what the code might look like in Applescript would be greatly appreciated. (I more or less know how to translate that into VBA).

Answer 1

I believe you have to use Apple Script in order to do this a bit better on the Mac. The following code allows the user to select text files which is returned as an array from the function. You would simply be able to modify the Apple Script to return other file types and select directories, I'll leave that to you.
The code that calls the function and displays a message box with all the files:
Sub GetTextFilesOnMac()
Dim vFileName As Variant
'Call the function to return the files
vFileName = Select_File_Or_Files_Mac
'If it's empty then the user cancelled
If IsEmpty(vFileName) Then Exit Sub
'Loop through all the files specified
For ii = LBound(vFileName) To UBound(vFileName)
MsgBox vFileName(ii)
Next ii
End Sub
And the function that does the Apple Script work:
Function Select_File_Or_Files_Mac() As Variant
'Uses AppleScript to select files on a Mac
Dim MyPath As String, MyScript As String, MyFiles As String, MySplit As Variant
'Get the documents folder as a default
On Error Resume Next
MyPath = MacScript("return (path to documents folder) as String")
'Set up the Apple Script to look for text files
MyScript = "set applescript's text item delimiters to "","" " & vbNewLine & _
"set theFiles to (choose file of type " & " {""public.TEXT""} " & _
"with prompt ""Please select a file or files"" default location alias """ & _
MyPath & """ multiple selections allowed true) as string" & vbNewLine & _
"set applescript's text item delimiters to """" " & vbNewLine & _
"return theFiles"
'Run the Apple Script
MyFiles = MacScript(MyScript)
On Error GoTo 0
'If there are multiple files, split it into an array and return the results
If MyFiles <> "" Then
MySplit = Split(MyFiles, ",")
Select_File_Or_Files_Mac = MySplit
End If
End Function
Finally, it can be a bit of a pain specifying different file types, if you want to specify only Word documents, then replace public.TEXT with com.microsoft.word.doc, however this won't allow .docx or .docm files. You need to use org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document and org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document.macroenabled respectively for these. For more info on these see: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/understanding_utis/understand_utis_conc/understand_utis_conc.html