Creating a Custom Building Block Gallery for Word 2007

Lisa Wollin, Microsoft Corporation

Applies to: 2007 Microsoft Office System, Microsoft Office Word 2007

A building block gallery is a collection of building block entries that are of the same type. There are 35 different types of building block collections that you can create. Microsoft Office Word 2007 uses some of these for built-in building block galleries, but most of them are available so that you can organize your own custom building block galleries.

Building blocks are stored within Word 2007 templates. To access the building block galleries for a document, you need to first access the template that is attached to the document. Use the Add method of the BuildingBlockEntries collection to add a building block entry to a gallery. When you add entries to a gallery, Word creates both the gallery and the category, if they do not already exist.

The following example shows how to add building block entries to a gallery. This example assumes that there are three paragraphs in the active document.

Visual Basic

Sub CreateBuildingBlockGallery()
    Dim objTemplate As Template
    Dim conType As WdBuildingBlockTypes
    Dim objRange As Range
    
    Set objTemplate = ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate
    conType = wdTypeCustom1
    
    Set objRange = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(1).Range
    objTemplate.BuildingBlockEntries.Add _
        Name:="Primary Heading", _
        Type:=conType, _
        Category:="Headings", _
        Range:=objRange
    
    Set objRange = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(2).Range
    objTemplate.BuildingBlockEntries.Add _
        Name:="Secondary Heading", _
        Type:=conType, _
        Category:="Headings", _
        Range:=objRange
    
    Set objRange = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(3).Range
    objTemplate.BuildingBlockEntries.Add _
        Name:="Tertiary Heading", _
        Type:=conType, _
        Category:="Headings", _
        Range:=objRange
End Sub

Building block entries are very similar to auto text entries, but you can organize building blocks much more effectively than auto text entries. Each building block entry is comprised of a type and a category. Word provides the ability to create multiple categories within a gallery to allow you to further organize your custom building block entries.

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