Conditional mechanism in Word VBA

Question

I have a .dot file with one line of code that must be executed in a Microsoft Word macro if and only if the version of Word 2003 or greater is installed, otherwise it shuold be ignored. I tried to implement it like this, hoping that Visual Basic for Word compiles a line only if it needs to execute it. The code in question is the following (Word 2003 is 11.0)

If Val(Application.Version) >= 11 Then
    ActiveWindow.View.ReadingLayout = False
End If

I still want that the .dot file with the macro is usable in earlier versions of Microsoft Word, such as Microsoft Word 2000.

However, if I try to run the .dot file, it fails on Word 2000 with a compile error because ActiveWindow.View.ReadingLayout is not a valid method in Word 2000. That is, even when the line will never be executed on Word 2000 because Application.Value will be 9.0, Word still tries to compile that line.

Is there any way in Visual Basic for Word to add compiler directives so that some code is not compiled depending on the Word version?

Answer 1

We ended up implementing it with late binding, which turned out to be a very small tweak:

If Val(Application.Version) >= 11 Then
    Dim obj As Object
    Set obj = GetObject(, "Word.Application")
    obj.ActiveWindow.View.ReadingLayout = False
End If