Delete Negative Acknowledgement character in word

Question

I'm working on a vba macro in word that trims given characters from the end of a range. Whenever I have it try to delete the Negative Acknowledgement Character I get the error Cannot edit Range. The range has the size of exactly 1 and contains only the character with ASCII value 21.

What is the purpose of this character in a MS Word doc, why can't I delete it, and how could I delete it? I need to delete the character because whenever I insert text before or after it my inserted text becomes "Error!".

cheezsteak cheezsteak · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-28T16:14:13

The trick is to select the range and then use Selection.Delete like so:

Dim rng As Range
Set rng = ActiveDocument.Range(i, i + 1) 
Debug.Print Asc(rng.text) ' 21
rng.Select
Selection.Delete

Why does Selection.Delete work and not Range.Delete? IDK. I expect Selection be nothing more than the alias to the selected range but its not so. Selection is it's own class with it's own doc page and everything.

Delete Negative Acknowledgement character in word

1 Answers