Can Aspose Support Opening and Modifying Documents containing macros?

I have a number of microsoft documents that contain macros, and am trying to open them, make some modifications, and save them. Out of the pool, some of them contain macros, and I don’t know which ones. There is no .docm or anything like that, they are all .docx. Is there a way to programmatically perform my actions on them without knowing if they contain macros? Right now I’m getting errors on save.

@acn

Cause

When working with Microsoft Word documents that may contain macros, you might encounter errors during the save operation if the document has a VBA project. This is especially true if the document is not explicitly recognized as a macro-enabled file (like .docm).

Solution

To handle documents with potential macros, you can use Aspose.Words to check if a document contains macros before attempting to save it. If macros are present, you can choose to remove them or handle them accordingly. Here’s how you can do this programmatically:

Code

using Aspose.Words;

// Load the document
Document doc = new Document("yourfile.docx");

// Check if the document contains macros
if (doc.HasMacros)
{
    // Optionally remove macros
    doc.RemoveMacros();
}

// Make your modifications here
// For example, adding a paragraph
doc.FirstSection.Body.AppendParagraph("This is a new paragraph.");

// Save the document
doc.Save("modifiedfile.docx");

Next Steps

  1. Ensure you have the latest version of Aspose.Words to avoid any compatibility issues.
  2. Test the code with a few documents to confirm that it handles both macro and non-macro documents correctly.
  3. If you still encounter errors, check the specific error messages for further troubleshooting.

This approach should effectively resolve the issues you’re facing with saving documents containing macros. If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, please feel free to ask!

What would this look like when using aspose for python? Can you demonstrate also how I can perform the same operation on an xlsx file and a pptx file?

@acn,

Aspose for Python APIs provide support for manipulating documents (which are having VBA codes or macros). Kindly share sample documents (such as DOCX/DOCM, XLSX/XLSM, PPTX/PPTM, etc.) along with standalone sample code snippets using Aspose.Words for Python, Aspose.Cells for Python, and Aspose.Slides for Python to help demonstrate the issue. We will review it soon.

P.S. We kindly request you to zip the files before attaching them here.

I don’t have any sample docs I can share, they’re all PII, but essentially I just want to check for macros and remove them if they exist for DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX files

@acn,

  1. For Aspose.Cells for Python via .NET, you may use has_macro attribute to check if a workbook has macros/vba code in it. Then you may try to use remove_macro method to remove macros/vba codes in the workbook.

  2. For Asopse.Slides for Python via .NET, you may try to evaluate condition using Presentation.vba_project property that returns the VBA project (if exists) embedded in the presentation. If this returns None, the presentation does not contain macros. If it does not return None, it contains VBA code or macros, so you can set Presentation.vba_project to None to remove the macros/vba codes.

What about in a word document?

@acn,

A member of the Aspose.Words team will provide you with the details soon. @alexey.noskov FYI.

@acn Sure, you can modify documents with macros using Aspose.Words. but you should not that if the document contains macros you cannot save it as DOCX, you should save it as macro enabled document, i.e. DOCM. You can check whether the document contains macros using Document.HasMacros property.

Can you do the same thing where you open and remove the macros prior to saving as a docx? I don’t want to keep them, I just want to check all these files for macros and remove them

@acn Sure, you can remove macros using Document.RemoveMacros method.