Word-VBA Functions “Method Saveas2 of object failed”

Question

I have an access-vba application that also makes use of word-vba. While running the application on my local machine, it functions well. Once it is moved to others (same versions of access and word) it will crash when it comes to the vba portion of word. Commands such as document.open or .saveas2 fail: Method 'SaveAs2' of object failed for example.

I've also noticed that libraries that I've referenced in the application are required by any other end user. I'm used to just compiling with the libraries and from that point they are always included in the .jar/.exe/etc, but, it seems when you move the application to other's computers it's always trying to recompile?

I'm not well versed in VBA so I'm speculating that my failing word-vba functions are because of a referencing error, any other ideas?

Answer 1

The "libraries" that VBA can reference are actually COM objects, usually packaged as DLL files. They are objects which are dynamically instantiated at runtime (if they aren't already) when requested. They are loaded by Windows into memory and your program uses the COM standard to interact with them, calling methods and getting or setting properties (interprocess communication). There are generally two ways of interacting with them: early binding and late binding.

With early binding, you add a reference to the library while you are still writing code, which allows the VBA IDE to provide autocompletion and some compile-time error checking. You instantiate objects with the "new" keyword and by directly typing the object name. However, early binding requires that you select a specific dll and possibly a specific version of the interface. This can lead to issues if you reference a specific interface version which one of your users doesn't have.

With late binding, you instantiate objects using CreateObject or GetObject, requesting them by name from Windows. Windows will look the name up and return a reference to the object. The variables in your code are simply objects and calling methods is a bit dangerous because the compiler allows you to type in whatever method name you want and provides no compile-time warnings. This has the advantage that as long as you are calling well established methods and nothing new or deprecated, the code will work regardless of the user's version.

As for the error you are getting, you may want to check the version of Office on the user machines - SaveAs2 was added in Office 2010.