Update2: For now, I'm considering saving a temporary copy of the document in html format to display it, but this kills my idea to show the user's real time affect on the document. It's just bad practice to re-save at every character input and reload the browser. So, I suppose this may just be impractical for now. I'll keep my ear to this thread for any answers that might arise. Thank you for your help.
Update1: The WebBrowser works for PDF, but not Word Documents for some reason. Instead of displaying in the browser control, it opens the document in word. This is apparently something having to do with file to program association within the operating system, but I'm programming this to work on machines besides my own. Therefore, I'll either need a work around, or a way to change the setting programmatically.
Interestingly, when I right click on a doc file, click Open With, and select Internet Explorer, it opens Word.
Original Question:
I'm writing a VB program that fills in
values within a word document. I'm
utilizing the Microsoft Word 12.0
Object Library as a Reference.
I'd like to provide a scrollable preview pane to my user that is within
the form he or she is using. It
would be even cooler if the user could
edit the document through this pane.
I've done Interop extensively, so I'm
well aware of how to write and edit a
Word document. I just want to put it
into a frame and preview it. I'll
probably try to select around the
document based on what is changing as
the user provides input so they can
see what's being changed and where.
Thoughts?
Thanks
Would the print preview not do this?
Edit: Removed previous answer since it's not recommended by MS.
This article talks about using the WebBrowser control to open OFfice documents instead
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304643/
Okay, I'm answering my own question, but leveling up those that tried to answer. I've decided that the best solution is to actually open the word document, but keep my form's TopMost property set to True. Then, I can doc my form in the upper right, display the document being edited behind it, and select around to each point being manipulated. This effectively accomplishes what I was after.
Thank you to those that provided answers here. They led me to learn quite a bit of stuff.
Related
I have what should be a fairly straightforward question regarding libre impress. I want to make several buttons to jump around the document and I would also like these buttons to indicate that they have been clicked before.
To achieve this I used simple shapes (stars in my case) and added an interaction feature to jump to the desired location. So far so simple. In order to indicate that a button has been clicked before, I thought the easiest way would be to change transparency, colour or size of the shapes. Really any of those would be fine for me. I thought this could be done with a macro. My problems are the following:
I don't know how to write the macro. I have a rudimentary understanding of scripting (mostly Python) but not with this particular language.
I don't seem to be able to attach two interactions to one object (i.e. one for the jumping and one one for the macro to change the appearance).
I hope that there is a simple solution to this. Thanks in advance!
The tag is for Basic, so I'll go with that. However, LibreOffice macros can also be written in Python. To get started with Python macros, use APSO and check out this tutorial.
Anyway, here is some Basic code for Impress to point you in the right direction.
oDoc = ThisComponent
oDrawPage = oDoc.getDrawPages().getByIndex(0)
oShape = oDrawPage.getByIndex(0)
mri(oShape)
MsgBox(oShape.getControl().Label)
Whether you decide on Basic or Python, get the MRI extension in order to discover UNO properties of an object. This way you can find out how to change the button.
When you have some code, post another question or edit this one that shows the code you have so far, and describe problems you encountered.
I've already got the useful tip of how to play an external audio file.
And now I'm struggling of how to use it upon reaching a certain page.
I've managed to find that I have to add the stuff below to obtain a list of events I can use:
Public WithEvents App As Word.Application
And I got a plenty of the events:
App events
But no one from them seems corresponding to what I need.
1)Find out a certain event I can use, to track any action which might change currently viewed page(mouse scroll, arrows, page up/down, mouse move with selection, or any of others..) and then paste a checking function into.
2)The checking function supposed to obtain number of current page within the document(or it's equivalent) and if we are at a certain page play corresponding sound.
There are 2 main problems I've struggled with, but got no good idea.
I also aware that we can use ActiveX object and insert an audio file into the document, it allows to even not keep the file somewhere, but embeed it into the doc.
However here I even have no idea of how to trigger playing of the file through VBA.
But if somebody can advise about it would be perfect because it even more handy, in terms of maintenance(no need to keep external audio files).
Any help is appreciated.
If you know that it's impossible in general, please also let me know, so I can close the topic.
I have a document into which I copy all kinds of VBA code regarding questions asked on this site and write code in preparation for answers. This document was created on my PC (with Word 2010). It has no event procedure that runs on the Save event, but at some point a few weeks back it started to ask me the above question before every save, including automatic saves. The document is based on the Normal template which has no code in it. I don't know which code may have caused this to start, nor which code to even suspect. Other documents open in the same instance of Word save normally. It's only this one document that is affected.
The document also contains a lot of special items, like content controls, fields, ActiveX controls, EndNotes, tables and comments. I suspect the comments to be related to this problem in some way.
I know that I could probably stop the alerts by disabling alerts but that isn't what I want. I want Word to display all the normal alerts. It's just this abnormal one which I would like to switch off. Any ideas how to do that? Or what caused Word to issue that alert in the first place?
In these situations I make several backups of the document and then start looking for something that is broken. So using a new backup each time, I systematically delete portions of the document to see if the unwanted / unexpected behavior disappears. For example I first try to isolate the issue to the top of bottom 1/2 of the document. If I can establish that the issue is related to the bottom half then I delete half of the bottom half of the document and so on... it can take a while but it has been an effective method of finding issues for me.
That said, I tried this on a document recently and just ended up going round in circles. I thought I had narrowed the issue down to a single corrupt image, but that turned out to be NOT the case.
I've also found that there are some things that I can do with VBA that Word simply can NOT undo... I'm only aware of a few things (which I'd have to look up in my notes) but I'm sure there's a whole list of things.
A possible workaround might be to clear the undo history for this specific document prior to saving, I imagine that will suppress the message and save you from losing the standard notifications. Hope it helps :)
Good luck!
OK, this might be a bit of a generic and repeated non-code question but the latest article I can find about this is from over 2 years ago, so I'm wondering if there's been a fix or an update or maybe some clever dude out there has cracked the secret to curing this.
Every time I extend my screen while Excel (2007, 2010 or 2013) is running, and every time I unplug from an extension while Excel is running, my ActiveX controls are rendered useless, because with each click they either shrink or get bigger, depending on if I extended or unplugged.
This happens until I close the Excel application and restart it, unfortunately if I've saved it while the buttons are bigger/smaller they might end up stuck like that.
There is a thread here which has a bit code to help deal with the issue but quite frankly I'm hoping by now, two years later, someone has a slightly more efficient method of dealing with it.
I've took to using hyperlinks to run macros now but that's no good for my drop-boxes and things. And for me personally, I can just make sure I close Excel before extending/unplugging, but the real issue is I'm developing apps for people around the company and it's starting to cause problems with these damned buttons.
Does anyone know of a definitive fix for this yet?
If you only need ActiveX buttons to run macros, use Shapes instead. You can assign macros to a s shape's Click event. Right-click the shape and select "Assign Macro".
The radio recently broke in our bedroom and as a result my missus now listen to various radio stations through her laptop. She moans that visiting various pages and clicking the 'listen' link is a bit of a pain. (Note to self: Must buy new radio!)
In the meantime, I have made a 'radio player' in VB 2008 Express, which is nothing more than 6 buttons down the left hand side of the 'player' I have created and a Web Browser Control on the right hand side.
Clicking each button links to the relevant player of the station she wants to listen to. (Being a newbie to VB and programming, I'm quite proud with what I've achieved so far!!)
Anyway, one station I do link to gives an "Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page" prompt: This one:
http://www.mygoldmusic.co.uk/
Well, thats the homepage of the site anyway, the actual player is here:
(Oops, seems I can only post one link! The actual player opens on-click of the 'listen' button then, sorry to be a pain!)
My question is: Is there a way to suppress this message in VB, or even auto-answer OK somehow?
The other sites I have linked to do not display this message, they just navigate away quite happily. Clicking OK on the prompt is no real hardship either, I hear you say, but in the interests of usability, I would just like it to navigate away from the site/player without prompting.
Remember, I'm using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. (I say that, because I've come across loads of sites that tell you how to do it with JavaScript, just not VB!)
I've got to the point of thinking it can't be done, but here's hoping!
Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. And, sorry for the lengthy question. Hope it gives you enough info on what I'm trying to achieve.
Thanks in advance again.
J.
The only way I can think of is to actually modify the DOM of the page in the WebBrowser control. That popup is loading when the "window.onunload" event fires. You should be able to override this behaviour by modifying the DOM.
The HTML document DOM (Document Object Model, essentially an object graph of the page structure) is stored in the WebBrowser.HTMLDocument property. Unfortunately, that specific property isn't available to the .NET version. It IS available to COM however, so through some very ugly and messy code you might be able to suppress the event.
The following code should be able to access the COM property containing the HTML DOM. The type returned is IHTMLDocument2, although you'll note that the class itself will return an object. You might need to add a reference to mshtml.dll to get the IHTMLDocument2 interface access the properties of this in a reasonable way.
Dim domDocument As IHTMLDocument2 = webBrowser.HtmlDocument.DomDocument
You can then access the OnUnload event (which sits on the "window" element, one above the document). Unfortunately, the plot thickens a bit here (I did say it was going to be ugly) because you need to pass a IDispatch object to the onunload event. I've never done this specifically but I found a write-up at the following link that provides some samples and should point you in the right direction: http://blogs.msdn.com/cgarcia/archive/2009/08/28/handling-dom-events-in-a-c-activex.aspx
You should be able to follow a similar approach but simply do nothing in the handler method, which should suppress the javascript alert you are getting.
Get the handle to the dialog and destroy it. Use FindWindow and send a WM_CLOSE message to it.