CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vbams-word
Kevin
Kevin

Reputation: 1798

Word VBA How to reuse a temporary (unsaved) Word document?

I have a Word VBA macro that extracts the first sentence of each paragraph from a source document and puts the extracted text into a temporary summary document. It's an aid to better writing.

In operation, I write something in the source document, run the macro, and see the first sentences in the temporary summary document. Using set docsummary = Documents.Add, the temporary document always has a filename of the form DocumentNN, where NN increases by one each time I run the macro.

I want to use set docsummary = Documents("some temp name") to fetch and reuse the same temporary document over and over again. The problem is that I can't seem to set the name of the temp document without saving it to disk (and I don't want to do that because the macro should run on my Windows machine and on a Mac, and I don't know of a temp filepath on a Mac.)

Is there any way to set a recognizable property on the new temp document (a name, an ID, or whatever) so that I can search for that value to find the temp doc when my macro runs again?

I suppose that I might take the given name and save it in a global variable (if that's possible) for the next time the macro runs. Or I could insert some special text inside the temp doc and search for that special text later to find the doc in the Documents collection.

But I'm wondering if there's a doc property that I don't know about that I can use directly. Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 545

Answers (1)

Cindy Meister
Cindy Meister

Reputation: 25693

Using a global variable is a possibility, but those can "get lost" if something "hiccups" in the VBA editor or project. For that reason it might make more sense to check a document for something, at least as a back-up in case the global variable gets reset to Nothing.

In principal you can create your own CustomDocumentProperty. Or you could use a document Variable. These aren't things that can be picked up directly from the Document object, but they can be queried.

For example

Dim docSummary as Document
Set docSummary = Documents.Add
docSummary.Variables("DocName") = "some temp name"

Then later, to pick the document back up, in some code that needs to work with the temporary document

Dim docSummary as Document
Set docSummary = RetrieveTempDoc()

And the function checks for the Variable (or CustomDocumentProperty or whatever you choose to use as an identifier):

Function RetrieveTempDoc() As Document
    Dim doc as Document

    For Each doc in Documents
      If doc.Variables("DocName") = "some temp name" Then
         Exit For
      End If
    Next
    Set RetrieveTempDoc = doc
End Function

Upvotes: 2

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