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: Selecting a Bookmark in a Macro.

Selecting a Bookmark in a Macro

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated April 26, 2021)

You can select the text or document location referenced by a bookmark very easily with a macro. For instance, let's say you had a bookmark named MyBkMark, and you wanted to select the text it represents. The following code fragment will do the trick:

ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("MyBkMark").Select

You should note that the above will only work if you know the name of the bookmark. If you don't know a particular bookmark's name, you can use an index offset instead, as follows:

ActiveDocument.Bookmarks(3).Select

When this code line is executed, the bookmark represented by index 3 is selected, regardless of the name. Another alternative, of course, is to retrieve the name of the defined bookmarks and then use them within your code.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the WordTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (799) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Selecting a Bookmark in a Macro.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 5 - 4?

2019-04-12 05:39:03

bharath

I am having a word document in that i had given A as a bookmark for entire two pages and they are sub bookmarks in that main bookmark namely B,C,D. How I can select sub bookmarks(B, C,D)dynamically. I am using selection.Bookmarks(1) to get the bookmark name but it is giving main bookmark instead of sub-Bookmarks. Can anyone please help here.

2015-11-16 08:38:42

Alyssa

Hello,
I made a template with Checkboxes that hide/show certain tables with fill in content controls. IN my tmeplate the boxes work perfect and hide and show the bookmarked tables they refer to. But when I open a new document from the template, there seems to be nologic to what bookmarked tbale opens. For instance CheckMarkNew opens TableTools.
I even looked to make sure the book mark still took me to the correct table and it does.

What do you think the problem is?

here is an example of the code:

Private Sub CheckBoxNew_Click()

Bookmarks("NewTable").Range.Font.Hidden = CheckBoxNew.Value = False

End Sub

2014-12-12 05:01:54

Laurent

Hi Allen,

I would like to know if there is a limit in bookmarks numbers ? At the moment, there is a problem with one of my Word 2010 macro. Use to now, until 402 bookmarks, it was ok. But, beyond 402 bookmarks, there's a bug in execution.

Regards from France,

Laurent

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