Determining Where the Range Is Located

You can use the Range object's StoryType property to determine where the range is located. Stories are distinct areas of a document that contain text. You can have up to 11 story type areas in a document, representing areas such as document text, headers, footers, footnotes, comments, and more. You use the StoryRanges property to return a StoryRanges collection. The StoryRanges collection contains Range objects representing each story in a document.

A new Word document contains a single story, called the Main Text story, which represents the text in the main part of the document. Even a blank document contains a character, a word, a sentence, and a paragraph.

You do not expressly add new stories to a document, but rather, Word adds them for you when you add text to a portion of the document represented by one of the 11 story types. For example, if you add footnotes, Word adds a Footnotes story. If you add comments, Word adds a Comments story to the document.

You use the Range property to return a Range object representing each story in a document. For example, the following code prints the text associated with the Main Text story and the Comments story:

Dim rngMainText         As Word.Range
Dim rngCommentsText     As Word.Range

Set rngMainText = ActiveDocument.StoryRanges(wdMainTextStory)
Set rngComments = ActiveDocument.StoryRanges(wdCommentsStory)
Debug.Print rngMainText.Text
Debug.Print rngComments.Text

See Also

Working with Microsoft Word Objects | The Range Object | Creating, Defining, and Redefining a Range, | Working with Text in a Range Object | Inserting Text in a Range | Understanding Paragraph Marks