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Walkthrough: Display text in a text box in a document using a button

  • Article
  • 01/12/2024

This walkthrough demonstrates how to use buttons and text boxes in a document-level customization for Microsoft Office Word.

Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects for Word. For more information, see Features available by Office application and project type.

This walkthrough illustrates the following tasks:

  • Adding controls to the Word document in a document-level project at design time.

  • Populating a text box when a button is clicked.

    Note

    Your computer might show different names or locations for some of the Visual Studio user interface elements in the following instructions. The Visual Studio edition that you have and the settings that you use determine these elements. For more information, see Personalize the IDE.

Prerequisites

You need the following components to complete this walkthrough:

Create the project

The first step is to create a Word Document project.

To create a new project

  1. Create a Word Document project with the name My Word Button. In the wizard, select Create a new document.

    For more information, see How to: Create Office projects in Visual Studio.

    Visual Studio opens the new Word document in the designer and adds the My Word Button project to Solution Explorer.

Add controls to the Word document

The user interface controls consist of a button and a text box on the Word document.

To add a button and a text box

  1. Verify that the document is open in the Visual Studio designer.

  2. From the Common Controls tab of the Toolbox, drag a TextBox control to the document.

    Note

    In Word, controls are dropped in-line with text by default. You can modify the way controls and shape objects are inserted by changing the default on the Edit tab of the Options dialog box in Word.

  3. On the View menu, select Properties Window.

  4. Find TextBox1 in the Properties window drop-down box and change the Name property of the text box to displayText.

  5. Drag a Button control to the document and change the following properties.

    Property Value
    Name insertText
    Text Insert Text

    Now you can write the code that will run when the button is clicked.

Populate the text box when the button is clicked

Every time the user selects the button, Hello World! is added to the text box.

To write to the text box when the button is clicked

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click ThisDocument, and then select View Code on the shortcut menu.

  2. Add the following code to the Click event handler of the button.

    private void insertText_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    this.displayText.Text += "Hello World!";
}

  3. In C#, you must add an event handler for the button to the Startup event. For information about creating event handlers, see How to: Create event handlers in Office projects.

    this.insertText.Click += new EventHandler(insertText_Click);

Test the application

You can now test your document to make sure that the message Hello World! appears in the text box when you select the button.

To test your document

  1. Press F5 to run your project.

  2. Select the button.

  3. Confirm that Hello World! appears in the text box.

Next steps

This walkthrough shows the basics of using buttons and text boxes on Word documents. Here are some tasks that might come next:

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Additional resources