» Removing a ListTemplate from a style in Word The WordMeister

Removing a ListTemplate from a style in Word

Ran into an interesting question on Stack Overflow the other day. The problem description is short, so I’ll copy it here:

There is a word VBA method style("style").LinkToListTemplate ListTemplate:=Nothing which is used to set the style numbering to None. My problem is that I cannot find the same in C# word interop. The method exists but does not work with style.LinkToListTemplate(null).

For starters, I had never even thought about how to remove a ListTemplate from a Word style – so I learned something new and very useful.

Figuring out the C# took a little thought. As the OP said, how to pass the correct value to the LinkToListTemplate method? After some consideration and a bit of experimenting I realised that the LinkToListTemplate method requires a ListTemplate object.

VBA isn’t so choosy; as usual, it figures out the correct data type for the developer, so the following works:

Sub StyleWithListTemplate()
    Dim styl As word.style, lt As word.ListTemplate
    
    Set styl = ActiveDocument.styles("test")
    ''' Use the following to attach a ListTemplate to the style 
    ''' (assumes the document has two ListTemplates!)
    'Set lt = ActiveDocument.ListTemplates(2)
    'styl.LinkToListTemplate ListTemplate:=lt, ListLevelNumber:=1

    ''' Remove the ListTemplate from the style
    styl.LinkToListTemplate ListTemplate:=Nothing
End Sub

In C# the method works like this:

Word.ListTemplate lt = null;
styl.LinkToListTemplate(lt);

Note: While testing I noticed that assigning and removing a ListTemplate to/from a style (that’s used in the document) creates additional ListTemplates in the document. This can be a problem if you do it a lot in the one document. In the version where ListTemplates were introduced (97, as I recall) it could corrupt files, or even crash them. MS fixed that by having Word automatically delete unused LTs when a critical number accumulated. But it can affect file size.

This entry was posted on March 29, 2018 at 16:58 and is filed under Word object model. Tagged: numbering, object model, styles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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