Saving in Document Format from a Macro

by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 18, 2011)

Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Saving in Document Format from a Macro.

Anthony regularly imports multiple reports, in text files (i.e, filename.txt), into Word. He then uses macros to format this imported information. After the formatting macro is complete, Anthony manually uses "Save As" for each report to save it as a Word document. He is wondering what commands he should add to his macro to automate the last step of saving the data. Anthony would like to have the macro save the file using the same root name as the original text file, only changing it to Word format, as in filename.doc.

The steps to actually save the file are relatively easy. Consider the following code snippet, which saves a document in Word format:

ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=sDocName, _
  FileFormat:=wdFormatDocument

The name of the file is stored in the sDocName variable, and the setting for the FileFormat property indicates that you want the document saved in the Word format. In an existing macro, the only thing left to do would be to set up sDocName with the filename that is desired.

Assuming that you have saved your original text file name into the variable sOrigName, you could use the following code to change the extension to .doc, and then save the file:

sDocName = Left(sOrigName, Len(sOrigName) - 4)
sDocName = sDocName & ".doc"
ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=sDocName, _
  FileFormat:=wdFormatDocument

The code assumes that the last four characters of sOrigName contain the filename extension (the period plus three characters). These are stripped of and the ".doc" extension added.

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