Finding Punctuation-Free Paragraphs

Johann has a rather long document, and there are some paragraphs that have no punctuation in them. Johann would like to find these paragraphs, skipping any that use the built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.). He wonders about the best way to locate these punctuation-free paragraphs.

The only way to accomplish a task such as this would be to use a macro. Fortunately, such a macro can run very, very quickly, even on long documents. Consider the following macro:

Sub MarkNoPunc()
    Dim sPunc As String
    Dim sParRaw As String
    Dim sParStyle As String
    Dim bFoundPunc As Boolean
    Dim J As Integer
    Dim K As Integer

    sPunc = "!?.,;:"

    For J = 1 To ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.Count
        sParStyle = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(J).Style
        ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(J).Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdAuto

        If Left(sParStyle, 8) <> "Heading " Then
            bFoundPunc = False

            sParRaw = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(J).Range.Text
            For K = 1 To Len(sPunc)
                If InStr(sParRaw, Mid(sPunc, K, 1)) > 0 Then bFoundPunc = True
            Next K

            If Not bFoundPunc Then
                ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(J).Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
            End If
        End If
    Next J
End Sub

The macro steps through each paragraph in the document, assigning the name of the paragraph's style to the sParStyle variable, and then making sure that the paragraph isn't highlighted. (This is done by setting the .HighlightColorIndex property equal to the wdAuto constant.) The macro then checks if the style begins with the text "Heading ", and if it doesn't, then it stuffs the text of the paragraph into the sParRaw variable.

The text is checked against each character in the sPunc string, and if the character is found, then the bFoundPunc variable is set to True. After checking each character, then the paragraph is highlighted in yellow if bFoundPunc is still False.

You'll want to pay special attention to the contents of the sPunc variable. As shown in the macro, it contains six different punctuation characters. Change the contents of sPunc to make sure it contains any character you want used to disqualify the highlighting of a paragraph.

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