Inserting text immediately preceeding a Field (Office XP/2003 VBA)

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Hi, all. Again, I’m humbled… after all these years, I do not know the most efficient way of doing something that seems so simple.

I want to programmatically insert text immediately preceding a field code, using the Range object. I figured I’d determine the “insertion point” by setting a range variable to the same range as the current Field.Result, then collapsing it. But when I do that and use the Insert method, the text is added to the field results, which of course means that it will go away when the field is next updated. I want it added outside the field, in front of it.

So, my question is, what’s the trick to adding text to a range immediately preceding a field code? Should I not use the field code’s range when I initially use the Set statement for the insertion range? Is there an obscure argument to the InsertAfter method that prevents the text from becoming part of the following field?

Here is a snippit of how I’m currently trying to do it. (The tField variable is the current field, which is part of the document’s Fields collection, accessed with a “For Each” loop.)

Set nRange = tField.Result
nRange.Collapse
nRange.InsertAfter “: ”

Any tips? Tricks? Best Practices?

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Not sure about best practices, but this should work:

myRange.MoveStartUntil CSet:=Chr(19), Count:=wdBackward
myRange.MoveStart Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
myRange.Collapse (wdCollapseStart)

It moves the cursor to the left until it finds the code of an opening field brace ^19, then one character more.
I imagine it’s hard to impossible to do using only Field.Code or Field.Result, since some types of fields have (or can have) one of those, or the other, or both.

Klaus

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Along the lines suggested by Klaus, you can move the start of the range back one character before collapsing, then advance it one character, to avoid adding content to the field:

nRange.MoveStart wdCharacter, -1
nRange.Collapse wdCollapseStart
nRange.MoveStart wdCharacter, 1

Obviously this won’t work if the field is the first thing in the document, but I suppose that doesn’t happen very often…

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And piling on, this one does seem to work regardless of whether the field is the first thing in the document or not.

  Dim nRange As Range
  Set nRange = ActiveDocument.Fields(1).Code
  nRange.Start = nRange.Start - 1
  nRange.InsertBefore ": "

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I neglected to thank you for your help (and, since I have been helped by you in the past, that is most egregious… Sorry!)

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