Microsoft Word is an amazingly complete and complex environment to work in. Most of us wordsmiths (and I count myself as one since I write a lot) don't use even a part of the capability that is built into Word. So it's natural to ask the question, "Why do I need even more capability in VBA programs that I write myself?"
Read On and See!
As an added bonus, the last page of this part of the tutorial has been turned into a library of macro examples collected from questions sent in by About Visual Basic readers. More examples will be added as new questions are answered!
(ps ... As mentioned in the first lesson, this tutorial is based on Word 2000 and VBA 6 because that's what most of our readers are using.)
No matter how many features Microsoft builds into Word, there are going to be things that you will want to do over and over in lots of documents. There may also be functions in other documents, such as part of an Excel spreadsheet, that you want to use in your Word document. And ... Microsoft may have simply left out a feature that you want to have available in your "personalized" version of Word.
To introduce you to Microsoft Word VBA programming, we're first going to code a very short program that is sort of a "bootstrap" for learning to program using VBA. After that's done, we'll create a few more short VBA programs to illustrate components, and provide additional code samples. The completed document with all of the VBA programs is avalilable for download here.
