The WordMeister

I’m breaking the rhythm of the series on Web Add-ins to report a bug that was discovered by a developer in the VSTO forum, this week.

Since the release of Word 2013 we’ve been seeing sporadic complaints in the Word forum from developers that the selection highlighting disappears after their code executes. Only yesterday did someone post steps to reproduce the issue that worked consistently. It turns out that this is, indeed, “unexpected behavior”. Apparently the screen redraw isn’t firing as […]

There was a discussion in the Open XML SDK forum today that I found interesting. Certain namespaces for Office 2010 weren’t being recognized with a reference to the Open XML SDK version 2.0, even though they should have been. The references were being picked up just fine with a reference to the newer Open XML […]

A poster in the Word for Developers forum has brought a new problem with the Documents collection to light this week. Unlike the one discussed in an earlier blog post, this behavior applies to all current versions of Word, including 2013. Back when the Internet was comparatively new, Word didn’t know how to handle URLs […]

I attempted to upgrade a Word 2007 document-level customization, created with VSTO 2008 to VSTO 2012 and Word 2013 the other day. Even after following all the migration steps, I was still getting an error message for the Document Designer: “Designer failed to load correctly. Do not use the Designer to work on the document […]

The more people use Word 2013, the more changes and problems are bubbling to the surface. Again, this one was brought to the world’s attention in the Word for Developers forum. “Reading mode” was introduced a few years ago to provide a more efficient way to read documents on-screen. By default, documents opened from an […]

EDIT: There’s an update to this in a new blog entry. To summarize: this behavior is by design and there is a workaround for the problem. A new bug was reported in the Word for Developers forum this week. I also received an email about the same behavior. Microsoft confirms the behavior but isn’t yet […]

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 […]

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 […]

There is apparently a bug in the Open XML SDK 2.0 when trying to work with a document that contains a Ribbon extension using the namespace for Office 2010 <customUI xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2009/07/customui“> If the document contains a customUI12 part, you get the error ArgumentOutOfRangeException when using WordProcessingDocument.Open. The problem appears to be fixed in Open XML […]

Mostly, I work with Word and that’s what this blog is usually about. But I do program inter-Office with Excel, PowerPoint and Access, when the need arises. Of those, PowerPoint is my least favorite – I find the object model impenetrable and always have to ask questions of my colleagues in the PowerPoint forum… One […]

A fairly common question in the world of Word Development is how to merge multiple documents into one. (See for example this discussion in the MSDN Open XML SDK forum.)

A person in the Word for Developers forum brought an important bug to our attention last week. When documents are opened/created then closed the Documents collection does not keep proper track. The index value is not reduced correctly (there are more documents in the collection than there should be) and some document names are missing while […]