Writing Word Macros, Second Edition

A Final Note on VBA

There is a lot more to the VBA language than I have covered here. (In fact, the VBA reference manual is about 300 pages long.) However, I have covered the main points needed to begin Word VBA programming.

Actually, many Word VBA programming tasks require only a small portion of VBA’s features; you will probably find yourself wrestling much more with Word’s object model than with the VBA language itself.

I conclude our discussion of the VBA language per se with a brief outline of topics for further study, which you can do using the VBA help files.

File-Related Functions

VBA has a large number of functions related to file and directory housekeeping. Some of these are:

Dir

Find a file with a certain name

FileLen

Get the length of a file

FileTimeDate

Get the date stamp of a file

FileCopy

Copy a file

Kill

Delete a file

Name

Rename a file or directory

RmDir

Delete a directory

MkDir

Make a new directory

In addition to these file-related functions, there may be times when it is useful to create new text files (as opposed to Word files) to store data. VBA provides a number of functions for this purpose, headed by the Open statement, whose (simplified) syntax is:

	Open pathname For mode As [#]filenumber

Once a file has been opened, you can read or write to the file. I want to emphasize that opening files in this way creates text files, not Word documents.

Date- and Time-Related Functions

VBA has a large number of functions related to manipulating dates and times. Some of these ...