Occurrences of a Text String within a Document

Marc is looking for the fastest, most efficient way—within a macro—to determine a count of how many times a particular text string occurs within a document.

This can be done within a macro by using Find and Replace, similar to how you could use Find and Replace manually to determine a count. Each iteration of Find and Replace can increment a variable to derive the desired count. The following is an example of how this technique could work:

Sub CountReplacements
    Dim Replacements As Integer

    Replacements = 0
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = InputBox("Enter the text you want to find:")
        .Replacement.Text = .Text
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceOne

        Do Until Not .Found
            .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceOne
            Replacements = Replacements + 1
            Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
        Loop

        If Replacements <> 0 Then
            MsgBox "There were " & Replacements & " instances of " _
              "" & .Text & " in the document."
        Else
            MsgBox .Text & " was not found in the document/selection."
        End If
    End With
End Sub

If desired, you can make a text selection before running the macro. In that that way, the count will only apply to the selected text. If you want to provide a count for the entire document, then you should not make a text selection. The macro prompts the user for the search text, and then also uses that as the replacement text. It then does successive searches to increment the Replacements variable. Finally, a message box displays how many replacements were made, which is the count that Marc desires.

Before running the macro, make sure you save your document. It does change document content, so you will want to ensure that you don't save your document after running the macro.

You should also be aware that using a macro approach such as this does have a drawback—it searches only in the document body, and not in any other stories used by Word. This means that it won't search in areas such as footnotes, endnotes, headers, footers, or text boxes. There are actually 17 different types of stories that can be included in a Word document; you can find more about them here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.wdstorytype

A manual Find and Replace (which Marc doesn't want to do) will look through most all of the stories in coming up with its count. In VBA (which Marc wants to use), a Find and Replace will only go through the current story. Expanding the macro to search all stories would require a significant reworking of this simple macro.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11941) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Occurrences of a Text String within a Document.