Hi all,

This is a minor but annoying problem. I was wondering if anyone else
has seen it. I have created a vb.net program to perform MSWord
mailmerges. The final merged product then appears in the program via
an axWebBrowser. It took a while but the program itself now works
great.

The problem is that at the point of the actual merge, Microsoft word
becomes visible for a second, even though I have my
Word.Application.visible property set to false. For a split second,
you can see the letter template, then the open datsource doc, before
the merge finishes and the Word.activedocument and the Word.Application
are closed.

This does not seem to effect performance, but it's irritating. It ruins
the appearance of an otherwise smooth program run. Does anyone know how
to keep the application invisible?

Keeping the Word application invisible is, at best, only possible using
the Windows API to lock the screen. Partially, this is due to the fact
that Word has to be able to layout some things on-screen in order to
function correctly. I'm not sure that's the case, here, but it is a
factor in why Word does not lock down completely.

One thing I'm confused about in your problem description, though, is "the
open datasource doc". Why ever would you be opening a data source
document in order to complete a mail merge?

You also haven't mentioned the version of Word involved, but more recent
ones do allow you to open documents with .Visible set to false. Have you
tried that?

This is a minor but annoying problem. I was wondering if anyone else
has seen it. I have created a vb.net program to perform MSWord
mailmerges. The final merged product then appears in the program via
an axWebBrowser. It took a while but the program itself now works
great.

The problem is that at the point of the actual merge, Microsoft word
becomes visible for a second, even though I have my
Word.Application.visible property set to false. For a split second,
you can see the letter template, then the open datsource doc, before
the merge finishes and the Word.activedocument and the Word.Application
are closed.

This does not seem to effect performance, but it's irritating. It ruins
the appearance of an otherwise smooth program run. Does anyone know how
to keep the application invisible?


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)