Automatically finding words or phrases in Microsoft Word documents

September 26, 2010 12:21 PM

I want to check various Microsoft Word documents against a list of thousands of words or phrases and highlight/flag each instance of any of those words or phrases in the document. I want a way to do this automatically instead of going down the list and manually Finding each one. Is this possible? Thanks.
posted by Jacqueline to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: You could create a concordance file (used for generating indexes) with all of the terms you wanted to highlight, then do a find and replace on the index tags after the concordance runs to whatever visual flag you want.
posted by camcgee at 12:32 PM on September 26, 2010 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: @camcgee: I love you. Thank you.
posted by Jacqueline at 12:39 PM on September 26, 2010

Not a turnkey solution for you, but if I were faced with that problem, I would look into using sed for windows. That would let you compile your list separately as the sed command file, which would be easy to update as necessary. The trick would be to figure out what markup you would have to replace the words with to highlight them in Word-ese.
posted by ctmf at 12:45 PM on September 26, 2010