How to: Read from and Write to Document Properties
You can store document properties along with a document. Office applications provide a number of built-in properties, such as author, title, and subject. This topic shows how to set document properties in Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Word.
For a related video demonstration, see How Do I: Access and Manipulate Custom Document Properties in Microsoft Word?.
Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects and application-level projects for the following applications: Excel 2013 and Excel 2010; PowerPoint 2013 and PowerPoint 2010; Project 2013 and Project 2010; Word 2013 and Word 2010. For more information, see Features Available by Office Application and Project Type.
To work with built-in properties in Excel, use the following properties:
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In a document-level project, use the BuiltinDocumentProperties property of the ThisWorkbook class.
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In an application-level project, use the BuiltinDocumentProperties property of a Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Workbook object.
These properties return a DocumentProperties object, which is a collection of DocumentProperty objects. You can use the Item property of the collection to retrieve a particular property, either by name or by index within the collection.
The following code example shows how to change the built-in Revision Number property in a document-level project.
To change the Revision Number property in Excel
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Assign the built-in document properties to a variable.
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Increment the Revision Number property by one.
To work with built-in properties in Word, use the following properties:
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In a document-level project, use the BuiltInDocumentProperties property of the ThisDocument class.
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In an application-level project, use the BuiltInDocumentProperties property of a Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document object.
These properties return a DocumentProperties object, which is a collection of DocumentProperty objects. You can use the Item property of the collection to retrieve a particular property, either by name or by index within the collection.
The following code example shows how to change the built-in Subject property in a document-level project.
To change the Subject property
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Assign the built-in document properties to a variable.
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Change the Subject property to "Whitepaper".
The examples assume that you have written the code in the ThisWorkbook class in a document-level project for Excel, and the ThisDocument class in a document-level project for Word.
Although you are working with Word and Excel and their objects, Microsoft Office supplies the list of available built-in document properties. Attempting to access an undefined property raises an exception.
