WORD

Add Captions Programmatically

When the project seems overwhelming

Faced with a repetitive task, I often have to make the decision, do I do it by hand again and again? Or do I write or find a macro to do the heavy lifting?

"Have you ever had a document with ten, twenty, or even 100 images, and then as an afterthought decided you wanted to add a caption to each of those images? This is an easy task through the user interface (UI). All you have to do is select each image, one at a time, and choose Insert, then Reference, then Caption. Unfortunately doing this through an image-heavy document is a boring chore and takes up a lot of time.

Fortunately, the Word object model lets you to apply a caption to a selected object. An add-in that does this for you is only a small chunk of code away. The sample add-in accompanying this article demonstrates how to do this. It also demonstrates many other details about working with shapes and images in Word programmatically that are useful to know about."