Microsoft Word tips/tricks/addons

February 7, 2006 3:29 PM

Hotrodding MS Word: I'm finding myself wishing MS Word had a few features that I hope might be available as add-ons somewhere (or failing that, personal tips/tricks). One would be something to tell you how many times you are using individual words in a document (like an enhanced word count), so you can avoid overdoing it. For example: "You used 'cat' 5 times and 'kitty' 3 times." Another would be some way to tag text so that no matter how much you mix it up down the road (as in taking notes and turning them into written text), you will always be able to tell what source each fact/quote/etc came from. Sort of like footnotes, but better, and ideally transferrable from file to file. Any ideas?
posted by gottabefunky to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Here's a pointer to a couple of Word VBA scripts that count words. There are three there, and each works differently. Try them out and see if they fill your counting needs.
posted by jasper411 at 4:24 PM on February 7, 2006

If you don't mind something that's not part of Word, Textstat can analyze Word documents and return word frequency or concordances.
posted by camcgee at 4:31 PM on February 7, 2006

If you know what word(s) you want counts on, you can do a search and replace, searching for the word and replacing it with the same word (e.g., search for "kitty" and replace it with "kitty"). When you do a Replace All, it will tell you how many changes it made, which would be how many times it occurred in the document.
posted by hootch at 5:46 PM on February 7, 2006

For tagging text, ISTM that you could define extra formatting styles, one per information source. Base them on whatever existing style you'd normally use for that kind of text so they don't mess up the look of the text.

IIRC, Word will let you search for text formatted in any given style; or you could make temporary modifications to a particular style (perhaps turn on underlining) for a quick visual identification.

You could make a template to keep all your info-source-identifying styles in so they're available regardless of which document you're editing, and you could make a central document containing footnotes/endnotes for each source.

You could even get really fancy and write a bit of VB that searches the current document for occurrences of text formatted in these styles and auto-inserts the corresponding footnotes, then stick that in your template file as well.
posted by flabdablet at 9:18 PM on February 7, 2006

HERE is your answer, afaict.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:30 AM on February 8, 2006