Displaying the Number of Replacements Made

When manually using Find and Replace, Barry notes that it finishes with a message as to how many replacements were made. He wonders if he can instruct Word to display the same message when doing a Find and Replace in a macro.

The short answer is no, you cannot access the count that is displayed by Word after it does its Find and Replace. There is a workaround, however, that may be usable.

When you normally do a Find and Replace in a macro, you use code similar to this:

With ActiveDocument.Content.Find
    .ClearFormatting
    .Replacement.ClearFormatting
    .Text = "old text"
    .Replacement.Text = "new text"
    .Forward = True
    .Format = False
    .MatchCase = False
    .MatchWholeWord = False
    .MatchWildcards = False
    .MatchSoundsLike = False
    .MatchAllWordForms = False
    .MatchByte = False
    .MatchFuzzy = False
    .Wrap = wdFindStop
    .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With

Upon executing the code, all instances of "old text" are replaced with "new text." However, because it is being run in a macro, Word doesn't display a message, as Barry notes. VBA doesn't allow any access to the number of changes made by the replace operation.

The way around this is to make a slight structural change, in this manner:

lCount = 0
With ActiveDocument.Content.Find
    .ClearFormatting
    .Replacement.ClearFormatting
    .Text = "old text"
    .Replacement.Text = "new text"
    .Forward = True
    .Format = False
    .MatchCase = False
    .MatchWholeWord = False
    .MatchWildcards = False
    .MatchSoundsLike = False
    .MatchAllWordForms = False
    .MatchByte = False
    .MatchFuzzy = False
    .Wrap = wdFindStop

    Do While .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceOne
        lCount = lCount + 1
    Loop
End With

The key change here is that wdReplaceAll was changed to wdReplaceOne, so VBA makes one change at a time. For each pass through the Do While loop, a single replacement is made and the lCount variable is incremented. When this code is complete, lCount will contain the number of replacements made, which meets Barry's need.

The different approach (wdReplaceOne vs. wdReplaceAll) does come with a tradeoff, however—it is a bit slower. Unless your document is seriously long or has a ton of replacements to be made, the speed difference should be negligible.

Finally, understand that as presented in this tip, the Find and Replace operation affects only the main document content. If you also want the operation to affect content in headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, and the like, you would need to step through the StoryRange collection to affect everything else. That said, a manual Find and Replace (what Barry is comparing to) also only affects the main document unless you specifically direct Word to affect other document areas.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13979) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.