Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I center-align a picture in a Word document?

— CD

Hey, CD. In light of the controversy surrounding World Series game 2 (was Detroit Tigers pitcher Kenny Rogers throwing “goopballs” or wasn’t he?) the Scripting Guys felt it was important to note that no illegal substances were used in the writing of today’s Hey, Scripting Guy! column: no pine tar, no Vaseline, not even any peanut butter. Nothing.

OK, true, there are cookie crumbs wedged between some of the keys on the keyboard. But those don’t count.

Of course, at the risk of tarnishing the spotless reputation of the Scripting Guys, the Scripting Guy who writes this column would have happily used an illegal substance when writing today’s column; he just couldn’t figure out how a dab of Vaseline would help him center-align a picture in Microsoft Word. As it turns out, the process isn’t all that difficult, but it’s not exactly intuitive, either, as you’re about to see.

At any rate, CD, here’s a perfectly natural, perfectly legal script that center-aligns a picture in Microsoft Word:

Const wdShapeCenter = -999995 
Const wdWrapSquare = 0

Set objWord = CreateObject(“Word.Application”)
objWord.Visible = True
Set objDoc = objWord.Documents.Add()
Set objShape = objDoc.Shapes
objShape.AddPicture(“C:\Scripts\Welder-small.jpg”)
Set objShapeRange = objDoc.Shapes.Range(1)
objShapeRange.Left = wdShapeCenter
objShapeRange.WrapFormat.Type = wdWrapSquare

No promises here, but we’ll try to explain this script the best we can. As you can see, we start out by defining a pair of constants, wdShapeCenter (and yes, -999995 is the real value we need to assign to the constant) and wdWrapSquare. We’ll use these two constants to center the picture (wdShapeCenter) and then to configure the picture word wrap (wdWrapSquare).

After defining the constants we create an instance of the Word.Application object and set the Visible property to True; that gives us a running instance of Microsoft Word that we can see on screen. We then use this line of code to create a new document we can work with:

Set objDoc = objWord.Documents.Add()

Our next step is to insert a picture into the document. To do that we create an instance of the document’s Shapes collection, then use the AddPicture method to insert the picture C:\Scripts\Welder-small.jpg. That’s what these two lines of code are for:

Set objShape = objDoc.Shapes
objShape.AddPicture(“C:\Scripts\Welder-small.jpg”)

OK; now it gets a tad bit convoluted.

As you doubtless know, CD, by default Word left-aligns any pictures you insert programmatically. To center the picture we use these two lines of code:

Set objShapeRange = objDoc.Shapes.Range(1)
objShapeRange.Left = wdShapeCenter

In the first line we create an instance of the document’s ShapeRange object. To do that we reference the Shapes collection and the Range property; in particular, we reference the first Range which, for our purposes, is just the first picture in the collection. That’s what the Range(1) is for. What if we had two pictures in our document and we wanted to center-align picture 2? Then we’d use code like this:

Set objShapeRange = objDoc.Shapes.Range(2)

After we have a ShapeRange object that references our picture we can then align the graphic by setting the value of the Left property to the constant wdShapeCenter. Alternatively, we could right-align the graphic by using the constant wdShapeRight and the value -999996. Or we could set the Left property to wdShapeLeft (with the value -999998); that, in turn, left-aligns the picture.

It’s weird, but that’s the way it works.

The final line of code in the script is optional, but you might find it useful. By default any picture you programmatically insert into a Word document gets plastered on top of the text. In other words, if you start adding text to your document you’ll end up with something that looks like this:

It might be a little hard to see in this screenshot, but the picture covers up some of the text. Admittedly, with a Hey, Scripting Guy! article, covering up the text isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But we’re guessing you’d prefer to be able to still read the document you just added your graphic to.

To address that problem we use this line of code to set the wrap Type to square (a task which requires us to reference the WrapFormat object, which is a child object of the ShapeRange object):

objShapeRange.WrapFormat.Type = wdWrapSquare

Now when we add text to the document that text will wrap nicely around the graphic:

Much better.

In case you’re interested, here’s a list of other wrap Type constants and values:

Hope that helps, CD.

Although we hate to moralize, the Scripting Guys would like to close by stating we think it’s a shame that, in this day and age, anyone who does something really well is immediately accused of cheating, whether that’s by doctoring a baseball, taking steroids, or engaging in some other illicit practice. Sadly, that’s the price you pay for success these days.

Interestingly enough, the Scripting Guys have never once been accused of cheating.

Hmmm ….