Encyclopedia

WordBASIC

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Source updated July 29, 2025

WordBASIC was a subset of Microsoft QuickBASIC customized for word-processing in Microsoft Word. It was replaced by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) when Word 97 was released. Contrarily to VBA, WordBasic was not object-oriented but consisted of a flat list of approximately 900 commands.

01Example code

The following code snippets show the difference between WordBasic and VBA with a "Hello, World!" example:

WordBasic:

Sub MAIN FormatFont .Name = "Arial", .Points = 10 Insert "Hello, World!" End Sub

VBA:

Public Sub Main() With Selection.Font .Name = "Arial" .Size = 10 End With Selection.TypeText Text:="Hello, World!" End Sub

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “WordBASIC”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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