Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Editing Word's Built-in Commands.

Editing Word's Built-in Commands

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 17, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016

Word allows you not only to edit macros, but also to edit built-in commands. You can replace or augment these commands with your own macros. You can perform the editing by following these steps:

Press Alt+F8. Word displays the Macro dialog box.
Using the Macros In drop-down list, select Word Commands. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Macros dialog box.

Using the command list, locate and select the command you want to edit. Once selected, the name should appear not only in the list of commands, but also in the Macro Name box at the top of the dialog box.
Using the Macros In drop-down list, select where you want your edited command to appear. For instance, you could select All Active Templates and Documents, or you could select a specific template or document name where your new command should be stored. The command name should still appear in the Macro Name box at the top of the dialog box.
Click on Create. (The Create button will not be clickable until you perform step 4.) Word starts the VBA Editor and shows the program instructions that make up the built-in command. (Some commands may have many instructions and others may have none.)
Make your changes to the command.
Close the Editor window by clicking on the Close icon in the upper-right corner of the window.
Save your changes, if prompted.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the WordTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11698) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Editing Word's Built-in Commands.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 2 + 5?

2022-03-03 07:46:35

James Martin

I have followed your instructions to get this standard vba. I will work with this to see if I can put an "if block", if there is or isn't image files (inlineshapes) in the Word Doc. And then select the first image file in a loop, and Open the FormatPicture Menu and then perhaps use SendKeys to reduce the image resolution. I use this a lot and have failed to do a macro to automate this with just SendKeys.

[I have thought about having a helper word file to copy and paste image files to it and then back to the original file to try to get around the inability to compress images automatically with a macro, but not tried yet]

Sub FormatPicture()
'
' FormatPicture Macro
' Changes the picture scaling, size, and cropping information
'
Dialogs(wdDialogFormatPicture).Show

End Sub

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