ActiveDocument and ActiveWindow

When you work with documents in any Office application, you interact with only one document at a time. Although you may see two or more document windows open, just one window—and one window's title bar—is active. The active window always contains the active document.

Quick Guide

If every window has a document and one window is always active, there will always be an active document (unless all documents are closed and only the application window is visible). You have two ways to get to the active document. In each application, a specific property is defined that allows you to return the active document. You can also get to the active document through the active window. Each Window object in Word and Excel (and the equivalent object, DocumentWindow, in PowerPoint) contains a property that allows you to return the document in the window.

In the Immediate window of the Visual Basic Editor for each application listed in the following table, type a question mark (?) followed by the code and press RETURN. Each line of code, with the exception of the code for Outlook, reveals how to return the name of the document in the active window, and indicates the properties you can use to return the active content.

Application Syntax to return the active document
Word ActiveWindow.Document.Name
ActiveDocument.Name
Excel ActiveWindow.ActiveSheet.Parent.Name
ActiveWorkbook.Name
PowerPoint ActiveWindow.Presentation.Name
ActivePresentation.Name
Outlook ActiveWindow.Caption
ActiveExplorer.Caption
ActiveInspector.Caption

In Outlook, the Explorer object represents the main Outlook window. When you first start Outlook, the window that displays the list of Outlook folders or the Outlook bar, along with the items in a folder or in a calendar, is referred to as an Explorer. In Outlook you can display more than one Explorer window at a time. Each time you click the Microsoft Outlook icon on the Programs menu, accessed from the Windows Start menu, you display a new Outlook Explorer window. When you open an individual mail item or appointment, the window displayed is referred to as an Inspector. Because you can have more than one mail or other folder item open, you can display more than one Inspector window.

NOTE
The ActiveWindow property in Word and Excel returns the Window object, and the ActiveWindow property in PowerPoint returns the DocumentWindow object. The Window object and the DocumentWindow are conceptually the same thing. PowerPoint gives this object a more specific name in order to distinguish a window that contains an editable document from a slide-show window, which displays a document (presentation) for electronic slide shows. Both the Window and DocumentWindow objects are windows that contain a document. You'll often see a reference to the "document window." This just refers to a window that contains a document and not necessarily to the active window or active document.

When would you use ActiveWindow rather than ActiveDocument? That is, why wouldn't you just use ActiveWindow.Document instead of ActiveDocument? Using the ActiveDocument in code usually signifies that your code acts on the document, but using the ActiveWindow indicates that you need to determine something about (and do something with) the selection.