Saving in Document Format from a Macro

Anthony regularly imports multiple reports, in text files (i.e, filename.txt), into Word. He then uses macros to format this imported information. After the formatting macro is complete, Anthony manually uses "Save As" for each report to save it as a Word document. He is wondering what commands he should add to his macro to automate the last step of saving the data. Anthony would like to have the macro save the file using the same root name as the original text file, only changing it to Word format, as in filename.docx.

The steps to actually save the file are relatively easy. Consider the following code snippet, which saves a document in Word format:

ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=sDocName, _
  FileFormat:=wdFormatDocumentDefault

The name of the file is stored in the sDocName variable, and the setting for the FileFormat property indicates that you want the document saved in the Word format. In an existing macro, the only thing left to do would be to set up sDocName with the filename that is desired.

Assuming that you have saved your original text file name into the variable sOrigName, you could use the following code to change the extension to .doc, and then save the file:

sDocName = Left(sOrigName, Len(sOrigName) - 4)
sDocName = sDocName & ".docx"
ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=sDocName, _
  FileFormat:=wdFormatDocumentDefault

The code assumes that the last four characters of sOrigName contain the filename extension (the period plus three characters). These are stripped off and the ".docx" extension added. If you aren't sure how long the filename extension will be for the original file, you can rely on the Split function to pull it apart, if desired:

sNameParts = Split(sOrigName, ".")
sDocName = sNameParts(0) & ".docx"
ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=sDocName, _
  FileFormat:=wdFormatDocumentDefault

To make this macro work, make sure you declare sNameParts as a string array.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (404) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Saving in Document Format from a Macro.