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MS Office Forum / Word / Programming / November 2004Removing blank spaces and section breaks
Hello Using Office 2002 SP-2, Windows 2000 V5.0 SP-4. I have a Word template with a userform where users can tick checkboxes to include blocks of text. If a box is left unticked the corresponding block of text is deleted from the document. The document initially contains all the text and pieces are removed if their box is unticked. My problem is that I am left with large blank spaces in the document which need to be removed. Also, if an entire section has been deleted I need to remove the section break as well. I haven't been able to find a way of doing this through VBA and would very much appreciate any help. Thanks Denise Crawley Hi Denise, You'll need to supply more information. It depends on how the template is set up and how the code in the userform is doing the deletions. Are the blocks of text initially surrounded by bookmarks, and is the code using something like this? ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("bookmarkname").Range.Delete Or is there some other arrangement that tells the code which text to remove? After the code has removed a block, look at the document with nonprinting characters turned on. What's causing the blank spaces? Are there empty paragraphs, paragraphs with large Space Before or with Page Break Before turned on, hard page breaks, Next Page section breaks, or something else?  SignatureRegards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org > Hello > [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > Denise Crawley > Hi Denise, > [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > paragraphs, paragraphs with large Space Before or with Page Break Before > turned on, hard page breaks, Next Page section breaks, or something else? Hi Jay, thanks for the speedy response You're spot-on about the bookmarks - that's exactly how I've done it. The code is as follows:- Private Sub RemoveSection(strBookmark As String) ' Searches for a bookmark named strBookmark and removes it if found On Error GoTo Err_RemoveSection If ActiveDocument.Bookmarks.Exists(strBookmark) Then ActiveDocument.Bookmarks(strBookmark).Select Selection.Delete End If Exit_RemoveSection: Exit Sub Err_RemoveSection: With Err MsgBox "Error no. " & .Number & vbCr & _ "in function RemoveSection" & vbCr & .Description End With Resume Exit_RemoveSection End Sub I've had a look at the remaining blanks with Show/Hide On. There is a single paragraph mark at the top of each page but the rest of each page is blank, i.e. no non-printing chars. Some pages have the paragraph mark then a page break, some have a section break but many of the pages are blank apart from the paragrpah mark. I must admit this is a real grey area for me so I'm not really sure what this tells you. Does this help and is there any more information I can give you? >> Hi Denise, >> [quoted text clipped - 59 lines] > > Does this help and is there any more information I can give you? Hi Denise, For the issue of deleting the section breaks along with the text, the answer is to set up the template so the section break *at the end* of each text block is *inside* the bookmark and will be deleted with the text. (It isn't obvious, but all the characteristics of a section -- margins, headers/footers, page orientation, etc. -- are stored in the section break at the end of the section, not at the beginning. See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WorkWithSections.htm for more enlightenment.) For the blanks, it's usually more important to know what's immediately *after* the blank than before it (the only exception being when the preceding paragraph has a very large value for the Space After setting). If the blank is followed by a hard page break, the answer is to delete the page break. Actually, the initial template shouldn't contain any hard page breaks, precisely because you can't tell when they'll cause problems like this. Instead, use the paragraph settings Keep With Next and Keep Together where necessary. If it's a Next Page section break, either delete it by having it inside the bookmark (if you don't need a section break there for other reasons) or change it to Continuous. If it's neither, put the cursor in the paragraph immediately after the blank. Open the Task Pane and select the Reveal Formatting pane. Look for and eliminate any of these settings from the template: - Page Break Before - Keep With Next, if the paragraphs that follow also have it so that the whole page becomes an indivisible block - Space Before with a large value (in the hundreds of points), although this would have shown up in the initial template so it's unlikely One final comment: The line of code I showed before, using the Range of the bookmark, accomplishes the same deletion as the two lines in your code, but it also doesn't move the user's cursor, and if the block is off-screen the user won't even see the deletion happening. To fit into your code, the line would be ActiveDocument.Bookmarks(strBookmark).Range.Delete SignatureRegards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org >>> Hi Denise, >>> [quoted text clipped - 101 lines] > > ActiveDocument.Bookmarks(strBookmark).Range.Delete Hi Jay Thanks very much for the info. Your advice on section breaks has helped enormously - so obvious when someone tells you! I'm still messing about with the blank spaces but the template is so much improved just by the removal of the section breaks. Thanks again Denise Crawley |
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