vb macro string width in pixel

Question

How would you calculate the number of pixels for a String (in an arbitrary font), using an Excel VBA macro?

Related:

• http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel

Answer 1

If you're using Word VBA (as SO MANY of us do :) ), you can always set up a Word.Range object (NOT Excel.Range!) to be the text whose width you want, which must actually exist in the document and be rendered in the relevant font. Then calculate the Range's End minus Start -- of course the results includes Word's Format/Font settings re kerning, spacing, etc., but that might be exactly what you want, the true width.

I've always been a fan of creating an invisible scratch document, or in Excel a scratch workbook, to use for stuff like this in code. So in Word I'd remove all of the scratch document's contents, reset all settings per the Normal style, insert the text, render it in the font/size desired, set a Word.Range object to the text (without the final paragraph mark) and get the object's End - Start.

Likewise in Excel I'd use a scratch workbook to clear all content from one column in some tab, set the column's width to 255, make sure of no word-wrap, insert the text (with a preceding apostrophe prefix just in case!) into a cell, render it in the desired font/size, auto-fit the column, and get the column's width.