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Controlling Repagination in Macros

Summary: For most Word users, repagination of a document is done automatically, in the background, as you are editing. If the edits are being done by a macro, the background repagination may slow down what the macro is doing. If you want to control repagination, you can use the Pagination property or simply turn off screen updating. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, and Word 2003.)

Ken asked if there is a way to turn off automatic repagination of a Word document while a macro is running. It turns out, in fact, that there are two ways you can handle this.

The first method is use the Pagination property of the Options object. You can set this property to either True or False, as follows:

Options.Pagination = False

This property is the same as setting the Background Repagination option on the General tab of the Options dialog box. (In some versions of Word you can only see this option if you first switch to Normal view.) If the property is set to False, then Word does not perform any background repagination. You can later set the property to True to turn the feature back on.

The second method for handling automatic repagination is to simply turn off screen updating. If your macro does quite a bit of slicing and dicing on the document, this is always a good idea, anyway, as it stops Word from trying to update the display. In some cases, the speed improvement for your macro can be dramatic if you turn off screen updating. You control screen updating in this manner:

Application.ScreenUpdating = False

Again, the ScreenUpdating property can be set to either True or False. If set to False, screen updating is turned off. If you turn it off, you should always set ScreenUpdating to True before ending your macro.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1710) applies to the following Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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