Error when attempting to open MS word file

PowerShell Help
1

Hello, I am new to PowerShell and I am trying to learn to manipulate MS word with PowerShell.

Below are the commands that I ran:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $Word = New-Object –comobject Word.Application

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $Document = $Word.documents.open( $Filename )
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:1

  • $Document = $Word.documents.open( $Filename )
  •   + CategoryInfo          : OperationStopped: (:) [], NullReferenceException
  + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.NullReferenceException

However, I have encountered an error and I do not know how to resolve it. I would appreciate it if someone could help me with this. Thank you.

2

You’re using the variable $filename but you haven’t given the variable a value. You need to set it to a string that represents the path to the file. e.g.
$filename = 'C:\mydocs\mydoc.docx'

3

Thanks for the reply Matt, I didn’t include the line where I declared the variable but I did assign a value to the variable $filename in the previous line, so I don’t think that’s the problem here.

Do you happen to know what the error message “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” means?

4

It means the Object reference (the variable) does not have a value.

I can reproduce the error by not setting $filename to a value. Please post your full code.

5

Ok, here is my full code.

$filename = .\Desktop\test.docx

$Word = New-Object –comobject Word.Application

$Document = $Word.documents.open( $Filename )
6

The behaviour you should be seeing when you run that code is that the first line opens the Word document, it doesn’t actually assign any value to $filename.

You should enclose the .Desktop\test.docx in single quotes '.\Desktop\test.docx'

2 Likes
7

Ohhh I see, the error disappeared after I enclosed the path in single quotes. Thank you very much for the help!