Accessing the Dirty Flag

Jerry has made a macro for version control that asks the user if she wants to save the document with a new version number. It runs automatically when a document is opened. However, Jerry would prefer to let the macro run only when a document is actually changed or altered in any way by the user. He wonders if there is an event that registers when a document is actually edited? Or is there, perhaps, a property that registers whether a document has been changed?

There is no event, but there is a property. What you want to do is check the Saved property of whatever document you are processing. If the property is True, then there have been no changes. If the property is False, then there are unsaved changes. (In other words, the True of False state of the Saved property indicates whether the document has been saved or not.)

If you want to do your prompting about a version number when the user is closing the document, then you'll want to work with the Document_Close event handler. Modify the event handler so that you check the state of the Saved property, in this way:

Private Sub Document_Close()
    If Not ActiveDocument.Saved Then
        ' Check to see if version should be updated
        ActiveDocument.Save
    End If
End Sub

You'll need, of course, to replace the comment with your specific code for handling what should occur relative to a version number. The Save method is used to save the document under the current name; if you wanted to save it under a new name you would instead use the SaveAs method.

There is one caveat to remember: It is possible for the Saved property to be set to False even though the user didn't actually make a change in the document. For instance, if there are fields in the document and the fields get automatically updated, then the Saved property is set to False. There are a few other situations where the property is changed, as well, but the Saved property is the most accurate way available to determine whether a document as actually changed or not.

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