Quick and Dirty Paragraph Count

If you want to quickly count the number of paragraphs in a document, here is a great way to do it:

1. Make sure you save your document.
2. Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of your document.
3. Press Ctrl+H. Word displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

4. In the Find What box, enter ^p.
5. In the Replace With box, enter ^p.
6. Click on Replace All.

Word replaces all the paragraph marks in the document with identical paragraph marks, and displays a dialog box indicating how many replacements were made. The number of replacements is the number of paragraphs.

You may not be that impressed with this method, since you can also find out the number of paragraphs in a document by displaying the Statistics tab of the Properties dialog box. However, the real power comes in when you want to find out how many paragraphs you have of a certain style. All you need to do is expand your search a bit.

For instance, let's say you have a certain paragraph style that you use only for figures. To find out how many figures are in your document, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you save your document.
2. Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of your document.
3. Press Ctrl+H. Word displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
4. Click on the More button, if it is available. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box (expanded).

5. In the Find What box, enter ^p.
6. Click on Format and choose Style. Word displays the Find Style dialog box.
7. Choose the name of the style you used for your figures.
8. In the Replace With box, enter ^p.
9. Click on Replace All.

That's it! The resulting dialog box indicates the number of replacements made, which are only for those paragraphs that use the figure style—in other words, you now know the number of figures in your document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (852) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Quick and Dirty Paragraph Count.