Chapter 4

Creating and Managing Files and Documents

Chapter Objectives
Estimated time: 90 minutes

Work with various coding techniques used to find files to open and to find folders to save files to. Use the same techniques to parse fully qualified filenames to retrieve the path or filename.

Display system-defined dialog boxes in which users select a file to open or a folder to save a file to. Customize the Microsoft Office File dialog box to make searching for files and folders easier.

Work with the programmatic equivalents of the following commands: New, Open, Close, Save, Save As, Save as Web Page, Print, and Properties.

Create and open Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files. Create Microsoft Outlook folder items such as e-mail and appointments.

Save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in HTML format for viewing in a Web browser.

Set and retrieve properties of a document, such as its Author and Title.

Before you can insert or manipulate content in applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Microsoft Access, you need to create a new document or open an existing one. When you've finished inserting and manipulating content, you need to determine where the document is going to reside. Before saving a document, you might want to add properties that distinguish it from others or help categorize it in a set of documents. A server, for example, may have a document library that organizes information about documents, manages them, and provides functionality such as version control and backup facilities.

The functionality provided by the commands on the File menus in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access help you create and manage documents. The File menu is used to create new documents and open existing ones; to save, close, and print documents; and to set document properties. This chapter describes the programmatic equivalents of the following commands: New, Open, Close, Save, Save As, Save as Web Page, Print, and Properties.

This chapter also discusses the programmatic equivalents of locating where a document is situated or finding a folder to store a document—similar to the functionality provided by the New, Open, and Save As dialog boxes. The next chapter, "Managing Documents With Events," describes how to set up event procedures that are triggered when the actions new, open, save, close, and print occur either through Microsoft Visual Basic code or from the user clicking a File menu command.

Quick Guide
This chapter has three main parts. Because you have to specify where a document is or where it is to be located in order to open or save it, the first part describes how to write Visual Basic code that allows you to retrieve specific file folders, determine if a file or folder exists, and parse filenames to retrieve.

The second part describes the methods and properties associated with the new, open, save, close, and print actions in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It also explains the use of the new, save, close, and print actions with an Outlook mail item. The chapter doesn't discuss the use of these actions in Access (with the exception of Open) because they depend on the data access object library you work with (Microsoft DAO Object Library or Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects Library).

The final part discusses how to set and retrieve built-in document properties such as Author. It also explains custom document properties, which allow you to define your own document properties that you can use, for example, in document management systems. The following table provides a quick reference to the methods and properties discussed in the chapter.
Task Description

Creating a new document Use the Add method on the following document collections in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint: Documents, Workbooks, and Presentations.

Opening an existing document Use the Open method on the following collection objects: Documents, Workbooks, and Presentations. The filename of the file to be opened is passed as the first argument in the Open method in each application.

Save a document to a new location To save a new document that has no file path or change the saved location of an existing (opened) document, use the SaveAs method. You specify the filename as the first argument and the file format type as the second argument in each application.

Close a document loaded in an application Use the Close method on the document object (Document, Workbook, and Presentation) in each application. Word and Excel also provide the Close method on the Documents and Workbooks collection object in order to close all opened documents. The Close method on the collection object is equivalent to clicking the Close All command on the File menu. The Close All command is displayed only when you hold down the Shift key and click the File menu.

Print a document Use the PrintOut method on the document object (Document, Workbook, and Presentation) in each application. PowerPoint provides a PrintOptions object in addition to the PrintOut method that provides functionality equivalent to the PrintOut method in Word and Excel. You can access the PrintOptions object from the Presentation object.
Retrieve built-in document properties in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint
Use the BuiltInDocumentProperties property of the Document object in Word, the Workbook object in Excel, or the Presentation object in PowerPoint to specify the property value you want. For example:
sProperty = ActivePresentation.  _ 
   BuiltInDocumentProperties("Author")
Set document properties using Visual Basic code
Assign the property values to the appropriate property index in the BuiltInDocumentProperties collection. For example:
ActiveDocument _ 
  .BuiltInDocumentProperties("Company") _ 
  = "My Company"
Locate, create, remove, and copy files and folders You can use the combination of Visual Basic for Applications built-in functions, Windows application programming interfaces (APIs), and functionality in the Microsoft Scripting Runtime object library to find files and folders and to parse filenames.

Parse filenames Use Visual Basic for Applications built-in functions that manipulate text strings. Built-in text manipulation functions include Left$, Right$, Mid$, Trim$, Len, and InStr.

The code you use to locate, create, remove, and copy file folders, as well as to parse filenames, involves a number of different functions. The following section describes them.