Word VBA, Adding Caption to Images

Jul 27, 2015 by azurous in Images

In this article I will explain how you can add captions to images using VBA. As previously explained there are 2 types of images:

Inline
Floating

The concept of adding caption to the two different types of images is pretty much the same.

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Inline Images:

Inline images are images that appear on a separate line. Adding caption to these images is quite straight forward. Assume we have the following document:

In the article below I’ve explained how you can loop through all the inline images in a document:

Word VBA, Loop Through Images

The code below will loop through all the inline images and add a caption:

Option Explicit Sub Example1() Dim intCount As Integer Dim i As Integer 'loop through inline shapes For i = 1 To InlineShapes.Count 'check if the current shape is a picture If InlineShapes.Item(i).Type = _ wdInlineShapePicture Then 'select the picture InlineShapes.Item(i).Select 'assign a caption to it Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Figure", _ Title:="<<Your Code Here>>", _ Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow End If Next i End Sub

The line below selects the image object:

InlineShapes.Item(i).Select

The lines below add the caption to the picture:

Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Figure", _ Title:="<<Your Code Here>>", _ Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow

The “Label” parameter determines what type of shape it is:

Figure
Equation
Table

The “Title” parameter, determines what to display after the “Label”. The position parameter determines where to display the caption. For more information about the InsertCaption parameters please see the article below:

Selection.InsertCaption Method (Word)

Result:

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Floating Images:

Floating images are images that appear among the text rather than on a separate line. As explained in the article below they belong to the Shapes collection:

Word VBA, Loop Through Images

Below you can see a document with floating images:

The code below will loop through the images and add a caption to them:

Sub Example1() Dim intCount As Integer Dim i As Integer 'loop through shapes For i = 1 To Shapes.Count 'check if the current shape is a picture If Shapes.Item(i).Type = _ msoPicture Then 'select the picture Shapes.Item(i).Select 'assign a caption to it Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Figure", _ Title:="<<Your Text Here>>", _ Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow End If Next i End Sub

Result:

As you can see, after inserting a caption for the first image, the second image was moved to the right. I have discussed this issue in the article below:

Word VBA, Get Picture Horizontal Position

As mentioned in that article in order to prevent such problems the position of the images will be changed from “relative to column” to “relative to page“. This can be done using the code below:

Sub Example2() Dim i As Integer 'position before making the changes Dim intPrevPosition As Integer For i = 1 To Shapes.Count 'check if the image position is actually relative 'to the the column If Shapes.Item(i).RelativeHorizontalPosition = _ wdRelativeHorizontalPositionColumn Then 'get the current position intPrevPosition = Shapes.Item(i).Left Shapes.Item(i).RelativeHorizontalPosition = _ wdRelativeHorizontalPositionPage 'moves the shape back to where it was Shapes.Item(i).Left = intPrevPosition + _ PageSetup.LeftMargin End If Next i End Sub

So the complete code would look something like this:

Sub main() Call Example2 Call Example1 End Sub

Result:

You can download the files and code related to this article from the links below: