Displaying Properties Dialog Box in a Macro

Bill wonders how he can get the Properties dialog box for a document to display from within a macro. In Word 2003 he can do this manually by choosing Properties from the File menu, but the process is a bit more complex in Word 2007 with the need to display the Document Information Panel and then displaying the advanced properties.

Even though the way that you display the Properties dialog box is different in Word 2007 than it is in earlier versions of the program, the way you do it in a macro is not different. You can display a Word dialog box in VBA by using this syntax:

Dialogs(name).Show

This works because VBA makes accessible dialog boxes through the Dialogs collection. The trick is to determine what you should use in the place of name in the syntax. For instance, if you wanted to display the Open dialog box, you could use the following:

Dialogs(wdDialogFileOpen).Show

You can find a complete list of dialog box constants at this site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb214033.aspx

Unfortunately, there is no "wdDialogFileProperties" constant that you can use with the Dialogs collection. This means that the full Properties dialog box cannot be displayed. You can, however, display "pieces" of the dialog box. For instance, you could use the following to display the information found on the Summary tab of the Properties dialog box:

Dialogs(wdDialogFileSummaryInfo).Show

This will work in any version of Word, including Word 2007. If you want to display the Document Information Panel, which is new to Word 2007, then you do so not by using the Dialogs collection, but by using the following code:

Application.DisplayDocumentInformationPanel = True