Send from PowerShell ISE to Microsoft Word Revisited

Many of you seemed to like my little PowerShell ISE add-on to send text from the script pane to a Word document. I should have known someone would ask about a way to make it colorized. You can manually select lines in a script and when you paste them into Word they automatically inherit the colorized tokens. Unfortunately, coming up with a PowerShell equivalent is much more complicated.

If you search around you'll find plenty of tools and scripts for generating HTML and colorized output from the ISE. I tried incorporating some of them into my script but they were much more complicated than I wanted to deal with. All I really needed was a simple Ctrl+C command. So I cheated. I decided to use the SendKeys() method from VBScript.

if ($Colorized) {
    #copy the selection to the clipboard and paste
    #This is a shortcut hack that may not always work the first time
    $wshell = New-Object -ComObject Wscript.shell
    #must be lower-case c otherwise you will end up sending
    #ctrl+shift+c
    $wshell.SendKeys("^c") 
    #timing is everything with SendKeys. This could be a lower value
    start-sleep -Milliseconds 500
    $global:selection.Paste()
}

I added a new switch parameter to the function called Colorized. This meant I also needed an additional menu shortcut.

$psise.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.Submenus.Add("Send to Word Colorized",{Send-ToWord -Colorized},"") | Out-Null

You'll notice that there is no keyboard shortcut. At least for me, I got inconsistent results using a keyboard shortcut, and often nothing. But if I selected the menu item, it always seemed to work.

Here is the complete updated function.

#requires -version 3.0

#this is an ISE only function
Function Send-ToWord {
[cmdletbinding()]
Param(
[ValidatePattern("\S+")]
[string[]]$Text = $psise.CurrentFile.Editor.SelectedText,
[switch]$Colorized
)

If (($global:word.Application -eq $Null) -OR -NOT (Get-Process WinWord)) {
    #remove any variables that might be left over just to be safe
    Remove-Variable -Name doc,selection -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

    #create a Word instance if the object doesn't already exist
    $global:word = New-Object -ComObject word.application

    #create a new document
    $global:doc = $global:word.Documents.add()

    #create a selection
    $global:selection = $global:word.Selection

    #set font and paragraph for fixed width content
    $global:selection.Font.Name = "Consolas"
    $global:selection.font.Size = 10
    $global:selection.paragraphFormat.SpaceBefore = 0
    $global:selection.paragraphFormat.SpaceAfter = 0

    #show the Word document
    $global:word.Visible = $True    
}

if ($Colorized) {
    #copy the selection to the clipboard and paste
    #This is a shortcut hack that may not always work the first time
    $wshell = New-Object -ComObject Wscript.shell
    #must be lower-case c otherwise you will end up sending
    #ctrl+shift+c
    $wshell.SendKeys("^c") 
    #timing is everything with SendKeys. This could be a lower value
    start-sleep -Milliseconds 500
    $global:selection.Paste()
}
else {
#insert the text
$global:selection.TypeText($text) 
}

#insert a new paragraph (ENTER)  
$global:selection.TypeParagraph()

} #end Function

#add to menu
$psise.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.Submenus.Add("Send to Word",{Send-ToWord},"Ctrl+Alt+W") | Out-Null                

#keyboard shortcut doesn't always work
$psise.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.Submenus.Add("Send to Word Colorized",{Send-ToWord -Colorized},"") | Out-Null

I can't guarantee the color copy and paste will work 100% of the time. Otherwise, you can always use traditional keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+C,Alt+Tab (to Word), Ctrl+V.

Enjoy.