I'm looking for a way to create a VBA script in MS Word that displays a list of predefined words. If the user clicks on one, it will be inserted into the document. Google searches only showed a way to create mailings with values from Excel but I want the words to be hard coded inside that VBA script (array maybe?) without any external files. Here is a small mockup how I imagined it:
Any ideas or tutorial links on how to achieve somehing like this? It doesn't have to look like the dialog in the image but have a collection of words in a dialog for the user to select.
Edit: It would be nice if the user would see a human readable label (like 'First name') but the inserted value would be a variable (like '$firstName').
For creating the pop-up with a list of words, you can try something like this to connect a displayed value to the actual value.
As for the inserting into text part, this post seems to address the topic. Otherwise here's something from MSDN (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/212682/EN-US)
As it turns out, Greg Maxey has already built something very close to the requested utility by leveraging the native Building Blocks and AutoText features in Word. He calls his utility "Building Block Quick Pick" and the code for it is included in a free Word template add-in that contains a suite of Building Block utilities that he has created.
An article describing his Building Block utilities (with the Building Block Quick Pick detailed near the end) can be found here:
Gregory K. Maxey on Building Blocks & AutoText
The add-in can be downloaded from here:
Gregory K. Maxey's Building Block Enhanced Tools
The Building Block Quick Pick tool can be used as is or adopted to OP's exact format.
It's worth noting that one can also just create AutoText entries, place them in a template (for example, Building Blocks.dotx) and then place the Auto Text gallery on the QAT. This will provide a visual menu that with a single click will insert text at the insertion point. Here's what this would look like:
And here's a tutorial:
How to add AutoText from WikiHow
I have written a code which utilizes Word Automation Service in order to convert the .DOCX file to the .PDF. I have noticed that in case the Word document contains a table of contents, its links are removed in the PDF. This is very bad for my business case.
On the other hand, manually opening MS Word and saving the same document as PDF preserves the links in the table of contents. This is the behavior I am looking for, but I want to keep my code independent form having MS Office Word installed on the machine running my code.
Has anyone had the similar issue and was anybody able to resolve it?
In my case, i found out that this is something related to Job Settings property. Try to comment or remove this line of code if you have one:
jobSettings.UpdateFields = true;
I'm trying to export text retrieved from a database into a word document in VB.Net and while I have a working example, I need to figure out how to style some sections of the document appropriately.
I have found a few working examples from MS Online resources (such as this one), which I've found can cover some basics:
para.Range.Text = "Quad Chart"
para.Range.Style = "Heading 1"
para.Range.Bold.Font = True
But it doesn't cover even some of the simplest of formatting such as:
How you align the text (left, right, center)?
How you specify letting?
How do you start a list style?
What I'm trying to find is either a straight answer to these or (even better), a definitive list of the commands that would allow most any formatting.
Also, I would prefer not using Spire, which seems to be a common answer.
Thanks!
The VBA object model describes all the classes, their methods and properties that you can use for the marking up of content.
Your suggestion to use styles is strongly recommended as a way of separating your code from the presentation. Create a document template (.dot or .dotx, depending on Word version) and attach this to your documents. Then, when the document is opened, it will inherit layout and presentation from the template and be correctly rendered.
The list creation is a little intricate as you will need to restart the list if you are using numbering.
If you are interested in a completely different approach, you can look at Applying an XSLT Transform in the Microsoft Office Word 2003 XML Software Development Kit. This describes how to generate XML documents and using XSL transforms to describe the presentation. More general, but definitely more complex to set up.
Your preferred approach will depend on whether you want to generate native documents with a template, or to require your users to install the transform using the tools in the SDK.
So, you have a few examples. Office VBA is a cut down version of VB6, so why not record some macros in Word, open the VB editor and look at what it does. It's also the easiest way to navigate the help on the Word object model.
In Word 2010 I want to add text to a document, bookmark this text and then cross reference this text in the header and footer of the document.
Can this be recorded or will I have to code it?
Yes it is possible.
Yes you can record in Word - allthough with some limitations as you can't navigate thru your text by mouse when in recording mode; the generated code will be ugly and full of "hard coding" but will give you an impression which objects, methods and properties might be relevant..
If you want a solution that is a bit more sustainable than a one-off, proper coding surely is the way to go. You should make friends with the following in order to solve your task:
the Selection object and its methods, especially GoTo, Move and its variants
the way to extend a cursor to mark text
inserting text using various Insert... methods (e.g. Selection.InsertCrossReference ReferenceType:="Bookmark" ...)
adding bookmarks to the Bookmarks collection
understanding how to manipulate headers & footers
Try some coding and come back with more sopecific questions if you get stuck.
I'd like to extract all of the information (formatted text, images, etc) from powerpoint slides into a flowing, readable (MS Word-style) format.
I'm not interested in keeping the slide concept at all--think of taking class slides from a college course and batch converting them all into one collective study guide.
I can't find a way to do this within powerpoint (though if you know of one, please share!) and,
I don't have experience scripting Office apps. Is this kind of thing easily done? Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?
Clarification:
In an earlier version of this post, I used the word "flowing" to refer to a slide-free (MS Word-like) format. This does not, however, refer to the actual formatting of slide content. So keeping bullet lists, etc. is fine and even desirable.
I don't see this being a simple task. College professors use a format of either "TITLE: BULLET POINTS OR IMAGE" or "EVERY WORD I'M ABOUT TO SAY" for their slides in my experience, and you're just not going to get flowing, readable text from the former no matter what you do. For the latter, you've already got your text, you just have to copy it to another document.
I think you might as well just open the PowerPoint, select all the text, and copy+paste into Word/Publisher/InDesign/your favorite page layout program. You'll have the same effect and the same amount of editing after the fact except without all the hassle of writing a program to do it for you.
Doing a Print operation to a PDF with the N-up options might be a good solution for handouts if that's all you need. You could expand the idea and condense ALL the slide decks into one, get it printed (with N slides per page and the note space next to it) and bound, and voila, instant study guide. I've seen that, and then you get options for note taking.
More power to you if you're doing this just because you can - don't let me stop you. There is much good learning to be had that way. You might want to look into writing a program using the Microsoft.Office.Interop namespace in .NET (starting at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772069.aspx ), or perhaps look on CPAN ( http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=powerpoint ) and do it with Perl! There are lots of ways to do it, but you've got to be up for the challenge.
Text is fairly simple to extract, but what text do you want? The text from the title and body text placeholders only? File, Save As, and choose to save the outline.
The other text on the slide? That can be pulled out to a text file programmatically, but in what order? Suppose you have a complex diagram with text callouts. Extracting the text is going to give you gibberish. There's no obvious/meaningful order to the text other than what the human viewer supplies by noting that "Ah. The arrow next to this bit of text points to the fribulator sub-assembly, so must relate to it in some way." Try doing that in code. ;-)
You could give the author a way to sort the text into reading order so that the code knows what order to extract it in, but that would require a fair amount of work on the part of the author.
If you can be certain that all of the content is in title+bullet form, no worries. Otherwise, you'd have to be able to articulate exactly what you want extracted, in what form and in what order before you could get anywhere with this.
MS Word-style is not only readable, but writeable as well (which was not specified in your requirements). If you want a read-only guide, PDF is your natural choice (either through Acrobat Distiller or LibreOffice). Combine individual Acrobatted presentations with PDFtk, or Acrobat or Foxit and you're good to go without any programming at all.
"Is this kind of thing easily done?" - Yes, your humble servant did a couple of similar scripts ages ago (extracting enhanced metafiles from Powerpoint slides).
"Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?" - Yes. Probably at hundreds of places, but not sure if any of them get posted to the 'Net. All things considered think you'd be better off learning some scripting and macro programming on your own, since a ready-made script may be not quite fit for your needs - and to understand and rewrite it you'd need more time than to code & debug from scratch.
Since you mention that title+bullet form is ok, open the file, choose to save as and pick Outline as the save-as type.
I think you could parse through the PowerPoint file for formatting, text and pictures. There are Visual Studio namespaces available for such a task. You open the file, parse through it and make Word file from these. Complicated work, as you would have to consider type of elements and their position, you would have to use a temporary structure for each slide.
Have a look at this sample code :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/gg278331.aspx
How to: Get All the Text in All Slides in a Presentation
Basically, using c# and openXML SDK 2.0, it loops through all the slides in the presentation, and then adds each text in every slide into a string builder. You can write out the result into a text file if you like (modification required).
Recommendation: <25 oct 2012>
For your study guide, maybe you could extract all the text in each slide, and dump those text programmatically (by adding that function into the sample code above while it's iterating the slides) into the "Notes" section of each slide. With that, you can print it in Notes Page view. You'll get the entire slide image at the top half of the page, and the actual slide texts at the bottom of it in the Notes Page view. It sure beats trying to copy and paste all the text from the slide into the notes section. You can even print it 2 slides per page, as small text would not be an issue inside the slide's image, and diagrams would still be visible more or less.
Unfortunatly, this method works for simple standard slide format ... meaning, it's OK if your slides just have a title, and a center text box with all the bullet points... any complex slide layout (maybe text boxes scattered everywhere) will come out in non-order and will be confusing. But at least you can still look at the slide image above to make sense of it :)