Characteristics of word documents

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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Guest

Hello,

Does anybody know how one can find out what charatcteristics are in a
document such as fonts, points, italics and so on. I need to open up 150
documents and determine what characteristics are in each document. I figure
ther has to be a better way than manually doing the search and was hoping
somebody would give me a heads up.

Thanks
 
Hi

There is no built-in way in Word to do what you want. And, there are
thousands of settings in any Word document. For example, there are over 150
built-in styles in a Word 2003 document, and each of those has dozens of
properties. So you would need to know exactly what information you're after.

You could build a VBA routine to open up the documents and gather the
information. If you have used VBA before, the following shows how to loop
through the files in a folder to get them:
Find & ReplaceAll on a batch of documents in the same folder
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/BatchFR.htm

If you need any specific help with VBA, you might like to post a question to
one of the VBA newsgroups, such as microsoft.public.word.vba.general. Let
them know what version of Word you're using, and what specific help you
need.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
 
Shauna thanks for your response. I am not looking to replace anything. i just
want to know within the document what the charatereistics of the text are. As
I stated, I want to know basically what font types, point sizes , usage of
bold and other styles. I need a break down of these charateristcs which are
defined within each ldocument. Would your suggestion help me do this or did
you misunderstand my question. Again thanks for your prompt response.
 
If your document is "properly" formatted, what you require is identical with the list of styles in use.

If not, you can see the list of styles in use and manual formatting in use if you turn on "Tools > Options > Edit > Keep track of formatting.

In both cases, things are complicated since Word doesn't update the list of styles/formatting in use properly, so you'd need to check the list and see if that formatting is really applied somewhere -- "Select all x instances" if you right-click on an item in the "styles and formatting" task pane, then wait a few minutes if your document is large :-(
Also, Word hides a few styles (say for footnotes) by default, so that is something to look out for, too.

Unfortunately, there isn't a good VBA interface to the styles and formatting in use, so even if you know some VBA, getting the stuff with a macro as Shauna suggested isn't very straightforward.

Greetings,
Klaus
 
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