Word for Mac Macro

Question

I have Word for Mac 2011 on a MacBook with Yosemite 10.10.5. In Word I am trying to create a macro that will insert a file named home.gif into Word documents. home.gif is in a directory called “List” which is a sub-directory of “Kindle” which is on my desktop (Desktop\Kindle\List).

The recorded steps are: Insert>>Photo>>Picture from file ...>>Desktop>> Kindle>>List>>home.gif>>Insert

Here is the result:

Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture filename:= _
     “/Users/macbookpro/Desktop/Kindle/List/home.gif”, LinkToFile=False._
     SaveWithDocument=True
Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture filename:=”, LinkToFile:=False, _
     SaveWithDocument:=True

On another forum, I read that the hyphens should be colons, so I changed it to this:

Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture filename:= _
     “Users.macbookpro.Desktop.Kindle.List.home.gif”, LinkToFile=False._
     SaveWithDocument=True
Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture filename:=”, LinkToFile:=False, _
     saveWithDocument:=True

That brought up: ““Can’t execute code in Break Mode”.

: < That's a colon. . < That's a period. Also, you can just use Application.PathSeparator — SierraOscar
...and this is a hyphen > -. The Linux style file-path that the macro record spit out should work fine (although it is case sensitive). What exactly is your question though? Are you getting an error? — Comintern
Whats the problem with recorded one? On which line it gives error? — Rahul
VBA for Mac is not always the same as VBA for winWord, especially not when it comes to file paths! So I've changed the tags in order to make this visible to people who work with Mac. — Cindy Meister

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-25T09:45:53

What you need is something like

Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture filename:= _
  "Macintosh HD:Users:macbookpro:Desktop:Kindle:List:home.gif", _
  LinkToFile:=False, _
  SaveWithDocument:=True

"Macintosh HD" is the name of the Volume (Drive) that the file is on. Your drive could be called something else. If so, you will need to change "Macintosh HD" to that name. You can see the full path name by right-clicking on the home.gif file in Finder and clicking the Get Info option. Look at "Where", and you will see the path of the folder, but with arrows instead of colons (:)

These days Mac OS X usually prefers Unix style path anems with forward slashes. (For historical reasons, they are called "POSIX" file names in Applescript). But Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 has some quite old code in it, and not everything recognises POSIX file names. In this case, Word's macro recorder does two things wrong:

it records a POSIX path+file name. That POSIX path+file name will be the correct name for your file, but AddPicture cannot actually use POSIX names. Using the other style of file name ("HFS") with colons works, but you need the complete path name as I have said
for some reason, it records a second AddPicture statement with an empty path name (""). That will not work and you should delete it.

Please notice that named parameters such as filename, LinkToFile and SaveWithDocument have to be followed by ":=", not just "=". So you need

SaveWithDocument:=True

not

SaveWithDocument=True

The reason you get the message "Can’t execute code in Break Mode" is usually because you have put VBA in debug mode rather than stopping execution. When you do that, it is really waiting to continue. However, if you try to start another macro you will get that message.

Word for Mac Macro

1 Answers