Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated October 26, 2024)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Joe is an author and he has some ideas for using Word macros to help with his proofreading. One of the macros he wants to build is for finding duplicate words in sentences and paragraphs. He wants to exclude the common necessary words like "the," "a," etc. Joe would like to highlight the duplicate words in a document so he can examine their use and make appropriate changes.
How you go about this depends, really, on how you want to approach the task. For instance, if you want to simply look for duplicate words that are side-by-side, then Word should do that already for you; the grammar checker takes care of marking those duplicate words.
If you, instead, want to find excessive instances of a particular word, then you can use Find and Replace to highlight them. On the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box you can enter the word you want to highlight, click the Highlight All Items check box, and then click Find All. Word selects all instances of the Word and you can then use the Highlighter tool to highlight all of them.
Finally, if you want a macro that will step through each paragraph of the document (or each sentence of a document) and look for multiple instances of any given word, then that is a much more complex issue. Stepping through either paragraphs or sentences is not a huge problem; just use either the Paragraphs collection or the Sentences collection in the macro. The bigger problem is dealing with text variations. For instance, does the word "dog" match the word "dogs" or, even, the word "dogged." Without a firm understanding of what, exactly, you want to consider as "matching," your macro can get rather cumbersome.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6957) 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: Highlighting Duplicate Words.
Learning Made Easy! Quickly teach yourself how to format, publish, and share your content using Word 2013. With Step by Step, you set the pace, building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them! Check out Microsoft Word 2013 Step by Step today!
Did you know that there are different types of returns in Word? Here's the inside scoop.
Discover MoreNeed to force Word to move text to the top of the next page? It's easy when you use the keyboard shortcut for a page break.
Discover MoreSome fractions Word automatically converts to single characters, some it doesn't. Here's why that happens and what you ...
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)
Got a version of Word that uses the menu interface (Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.
Visit the WordTips channel on YouTube
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2025 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Comments