The WordMeister

Since time immemorial, you’ve been able to save formatted and unformatted text for re-use in Word. Originally, this was called “AutoText”; in Office 2007 it was renamed “BuildingBlocks”. These can only be saved in Templates. Originally, they were saved by default to Normal.dot; since 2007 the default storage is an independet file, “Built-in Building Blocks.dotx”. […]

In my last post I showed how to change the target version of Word for a document using the Open XML SDK in order to ensure that “[Compatibility Mode]” does not appear in the document’s title bar. The code sample was in C#. In this post I provide the code sample for VB.NET. Due to a […]

A relatively frequent request we see in the Open XML SDK forum is how to make the [Compatibility Mode] text in the Word title bar disappear. By default, the Open XML SDK will create a document compatible with Word 2007. When opened in a later version of Office, [Compatibility Mode] appears in the document title […]

UPDATE 20-JUL-2013: Microsoft has provided a “Roadmap” for the various technologies for developing with Office applications. In a nutshell, it states that all three current technologies will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsto/archive/2013/06/18/roadmap-for-apps-for-office-vsto-and-vba.aspx With the introduction of the new “Apps for Office” in Office 2013 a lot of people are asking about […]

As more people migrate away from Word 2003 and 2007 to a newer version, more bugs are starting to come out of the woodwork. Again, this one was brought up in a forum. When a developer writes code to use Word’s built-in Find functionality, it’s usually to do a “Replace all”, or to run a loop […]