Looping Through Pages of a Word Doc With VBA

[osirun]

Hi there,

I'm very new to VBA so I don't really know if I what I want to do is
even possible, much less how to go about it.

What I want to do is, given a document, to loop through it, find all
the frames, and change their height. I can do this part. Here's the
hard part though: I want to change the frame height to a different
value if it's on a page with a heading. I also want the frame height
value to be different depending on how many lines there are in the
heading (if the heading is several lines then the frame should be
shorter).

Does any of this sound possible to do with VBA?

Many thanks,

Matthew Marcus

 

[Tony Jollans]

Ignore VBA for a minute, there are basic Word issues here.

First of all, although you say headING, I suspect you mean headER. Before
going much further can you confirm which you mean?

HeadINGs are paragraphs preceding blocks of text. They may appear anywhere
on a page and resizing Frames around them will most likely cause them to
move. There may be multiple headings, quite possibly at different levels and
of different sizes, on a page.

HeadERs are blocks of text and pictures that appear generally at the tops of
pages, although technically they could appear anywhere on the page. The
basic content and placement of elements is defined at Section level and, by
and large, all pages in a Section, have the same Header although, again,
technically every page could be different if the basic content contains
conditional logic or reference to document content. Checking the content at
page level is not possible in VBA - well, it does depend on version, but
even where possible it is very difficult.

There may be many effects of changing Frame heights, in extreme cases
changing earlier pages in the document. What are you trying to achieve?

 

[osirun]

Thanks for jumping in, Tony!

I did mean (I think) heading rather than header. Basically the page
may have a title, like "Lesson 1 - Ecosystems" at the top of it. If
it does have such a title, then the frame should begin at a lower
level than the title. So if the title is "Lesson 1 - Ecosystems blah
blah blah several lines of extra text" the sidebar frame should begin
even lower down.

To get what I'd ideally want to happen to happen, I'd have to (a) be
able to locate given page objects on given pages of the document, (b)
detect for a heading object how many lines of space it takes takes up,
then (c) find any frame that exists on the same page and change its
height property accordingly.

As I say, I have no idea if VBA for Word can achieve something this
complicated, but I thought there was no harm in asking! Cheers.

 

[Tony Jollans]

Well, this can probably be done but it isn't simple. This is page layout
stuff, for which Publisher is probably a better application. I'm not sure I
can visualise the circumstances where you need to be doing this, but ...

Off the top of my head I don't think I'd try to analyse the page the way you
are suggesting. Frames are anchored to paragraphs. If you anchor your frame
to the paragraph immediately following the heading and position it relative
to the paragraph then it should start in the right place; determining the
correct height is a bit more involved but I still think I would use the
paragraph following the heading as a guide and subtract its position
(paragraph_ref.Range.Information(wdVerticalPositionRelativeToPage)) from the
page depth or something along those lines.

 

[fumei via OfficeKB.com]

I am with Tony on this. Possible, but non-trivial. And for the same reason.
This is high-level layout, and is more appropriate for a layout type
application. While Word attempts (badly some times) to be a layout
application, the reality is that it is NOT a layout application.

Are your headings using an explicit Style? If not, then that makes it even
more non-trivial.

Well, this can probably be done but it isn't simple. This is page layout
stuff, for which Publisher is probably a better application. I'm not sure I
can visualise the circumstances where you need to be doing this, but ...

Off the top of my head I don't think I'd try to analyse the page the way you
are suggesting. Frames are anchored to paragraphs. If you anchor your frame
to the paragraph immediately following the heading and position it relative
to the paragraph then it should start in the right place; determining the
correct height is a bit more involved but I still think I would use the
paragraph following the heading as a guide and subtract its position
(paragraph_ref.Range.Information(wdVerticalPositionRelativeToPage)) from the
page depth or something along those lines.

Thanks for jumping in, Tony!

[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]

As I say, I have no idea if VBA for Word can achieve something this
complicated, but I thought there was no harm in asking! Cheers.

 

[osirun]

Okay, well, I can loop through all the headings using something like
this (cannibalised) code:

Sub CopyAllHeadings()
Dim NewDoc As Document
Dim SrcRg As Range, DestRg As Range

Set SrcRg = ActiveDocument.Range

Set NewDoc = Documents.Add

With SrcRg.Find
..ClearFormatting
..Text = ""
..Format = True
..Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Heading 2")
..Forward = True
..Wrap = wdFindStop

Do While .Execute
'when a piece of Body Text is found,
'SrcRg covers its range
Set DestRg = NewDoc.Range
DestRg.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
DestRg.FormattedText = SrcRg.FormattedText & " " &
ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("\Page").Range.FormattedText
Loop
End With

NewDoc.Save 'will display Save dialog

Set SrcRg = Nothing
Set DestRg = Nothing
Set NewDoc = Nothing
End Sub

I can also loop through all the frames in the document and set their
style.

The trick would be to be able to loop through all the headings - as
above - but be able to find out, for each one, what page it is on, and
correlate this somehow with a loop to find any frame on the same page,
then access that frame's attributes and set them accordingly. Is this
mad?

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Check out the .Information property of the Selection object. It can give
the the number of the page on which the selection is located.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP