The WordMeister

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

One of the most frustrating things for Word power users and developers is the accumulation of “bugs” in the product. If a problem is not caught early in the beta stage, it’s often around to stay. When pressed, the product team will often say that changing “expected behavior” will break backwards compatibility. Another reason we hear […]