Office Add-Ins: Working with Tables in Word. Part 1: Creation

In this article I will show how the Word JavaScript API can be utilized to add tables to your word document using an Office Add-In. This will be a multi part blog post as there are a lot of nuances and interesting ways in which you can play with tables in Word.

Introduction

In previous articles I have written about how to interact with a Word document to search and replace and even save the word document to Salesforce. Going back to a more basic level we are going to look at how to build tables in word.

We will be using the new Script Lab  which is a new Playground Add-In which can be used for development and general tinkering with Add-Ins. This and other articles on the topic are for demonstration purposes and are not hardened for production use.

The reference

For more information on Tables and how what methods/properties are available check out the documentation page – Table Object (JavaScript API for Word)

Creating a table 

At the most basic level a table is created by instantiating the table object and adding values to it.

insertTable(rowCount: number, columnCount: number, insertLocation: string, values: string[][])

This can be done from a number of different parents:

• The body
• A range
• A contentControl
• A paragraph

The method requires the following:

• rowCount – a number
• columnCount – a number
• insertLocation – Depends on parent – either (body: Start/End/Replace) or (range: Before/After)
• values: 2 dimentional Array – [[“This is”, “a table”], [“this is”, “a new row”]]

Using these parameters we can create a table from within the Script lab using the following code:

$("#run").click(run);

async function run() {
    try {
        await Word.run(async (context) => {

            var body = context.document.body;
            var range = context.document.getSelection();
            var myArray = [["a", "b"], ["c", "d"]];
            var table = range.insertTable(2, 2, "Before", myArray);

            // Synchronize the document state by executing the queued commands,
            // and return a promise to indicate task completion.
                await context.sync().then(function () {
                    console.log('Table added before the start of the range.');
                });;
        });
    }
    catch (error) {
        OfficeHelpers.UI.notify(error);
        OfficeHelpers.Utilities.log(error);
    }
}

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Conclusion

Using the Script Lab we have seen how we can easily insert a table into a Word document using the Office Add-In API. In future articles we will look at looking for the table we want to modify and then manipulating tables.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.