The WordMeister

A few days ago I encountered a question on Stack Overflow about using tabs to align content in a Word document. The required result was something like this: I started looking at the Word JS API documentation and realized there is nothing in that object model for inserting tabs or defining tab stops.

Currently, the list of underline types in the Office JS documentation is incomplete when compared with the list offered by IntelliSense (as seen in Script Lab).

My previous post on getting started with Script Lab and the Office JS APIs for Word looked at some similarities between the COM and Word JS API object models, based on the Script Lab Basic API call sample. This time, I’ll highlight the core part of the sample code that differs from working with COM/VBA.

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 […]

If you’re curious about the Office JS API application object models and want to get acquainted you can do so without any investment other than time. All you need is a Microsoft account and Office 365 / Office 2016 installed on your machine (Windows or Mac) or access to Office Online. Then you can install […]

…and the problem isn’t reproducible. I was confronted with a request to trouble-shoot such a situation, not long ago. A large organization contacted me and this was the problem description.

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 […]

[This is the follow-up to a previous post about mapping repeating content controls to a custom XML part.] As a developer, you might want to be notified when the user adds a new set of mapped nodes to a repeating section, or deletes a set. If you look for events for Content Controls to help […]

Some significant improvements were made to Word’s content controls in Word 2013. You can find an overview here. One interesting capability is a new kind of content control that brings back some of the functionality lost when XML nodes technology had to be pulled from Word due to the court decision in 2009. In the […]

I think many of us are still trying to come to terms with the fact that the only Help for Office 2013 is on-line. The official information can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178954.aspx in the section AWS (Assistance and Worldwide Services). The official line is that this is “better” all around. Help can now be searched […]

In a previous post I wrote about a change in Word’s behavior: Even if the user chooses “Don’t save” when closing a Word document, the DocumentBeforeSave event triggers. We’ve been thinking this is a bug, but it turns out that it’s not – it’s by design.

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 […]

When you create a new document in Word, it automatically bases on a template. By default, this will be the built-in Normal.dotm, but it can be any *.dotx or *.dotm file. This document will maintain a link back to the template, enabling it to use Building Blocks, Ribbon customization and macros in the template. Users and […]

It’s been over a month since I last wrote an article. Obviously, I’ve been busy… Among other things, we’ve signed a contract for a fourth edition of “Word Programmierung, Das Handbuch” with Microsoft Press, Germany. Word developer books don’t have it easy on the software book market and the German-speaking market is comparatively limited in scope. […]

In the initial release of Word 2013 the new Comment extensions, contained in the commentsEx.xml part, are not written to the XML returned to the object model property Range.WordOpenXML.

Once again, a forum question has prompted a topic for my blog. This time, it comes from the discussions about developing for Office 2013. For many years, a main focus of my work with Word has been related to importing and exporting data into and out of Word documents. The built-in functionality for this has […]

New month, new topic – for the moment, at least. Forums are such a wonderful source of topics to write about… Today’s comes from a question in the Office 2013 Preview for Developers forum on MSDN. In Word 2010 the Backstage was introduced with the purpose of providing management functionality for Office documents. The Backstage […]

In my last post I presented some of the new Comment functionality in the Word UI. The new functionality for Comments is also reflected in Word’s object model.

In my last blog post I described the new functionality in the Word 2013 UI for collapsing and expanding Headings and Outline levels. Today, I’ll cover the corresponding additions to the Word object model.