How to bold only a portion of Word paragraph in Visual Studio (VB)

Question

I am trying to export a Word document from a Visual Basic program. Different parts of the document will need different formatting.

I have several paragraphs, and I need to bold only portions of each of those paragraphs. I am trying to set the range within each paragraph that needs to be bolded, but no matter what I do, it only seems to want to to bold the entire paragraph.

I want to do something like this:

Dim Para1 As Word.Paragraph
Para1 = WordDoc.Content.Paragraphs.Add
Para1.Range.Start = 1
Para1.Range.End = 14
Para1.Range.Font.Bold = True
Para1.Range.Text = "Job number is: " + myJobID

... so that it bolds from the 'J' to the ':' (in Para1.Range.Text) but does not bold the myJobID (which is a variable I'm getting from the user). However, no matter what I do, it bolds the entire paragraph, including the myJobID.

I've also tried creating a Range variable that sets a range based on the entire document, but the problem with that is, the lengths of several variables I'm outputting on the Word document are going to be varying sizes, and thus there's no way to know where the start of the next section I want to bold will start at. So basically, I have to work within the Paragraph object rather than iterating through all of the characters in the entire document.

Hope that made sense. Any ideas?

You set the bold property on an empty paragraph, then added the text. Do it the other way around.e.g add the paragraph, add the text, set the sub range then finally apply formatting to the sub range. — freeflow

Cindy Meister Cindy Meister · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-09T06:32:10

In order to format individual text runs it's necessary to break the text down into individual runs when inserting. Also, it's best to work with an independent Range object. Between formatting commands the Range needs to be "collapsed" - think of it like pressing the right (or left) arrow of a selection to make it a blinking cursor. Something along these lines

Dim Para1 As Word.Paragraph
Dim rng as Word.Range
Para1 = WordDoc.Content.Paragraphs.Add
rng = Para1.Range
rng.Text = "Job number is: "
rng.Font.Bold = True
rng.Collapse(Word.WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseEnd)
rng.Text = myJobID
rng.Font.Bold = False
rng.Collapse Word.WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseEnd

If it's really necessary to insert the full text in one go, then Find/Replace to locate the text that should be formatted differently is one way to format after-the-fact, although less efficient.

Another possibility is to use string manipulation functions, such as Instr (or Contains), Left, Mid etc. to determine where in a longer string the substring is located. Then Range.Start and Range.End can work with those values. But generally it's better to not rely on the start and end values since Word can insert non-visible characters that can throw this numbering off.

How to bold only a portion of Word paragraph in Visual Studio (VB)

2 Answers