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Find text in word document using VBA

Hi Experts,

I have hundred plus word documents. What i want is to write a simple VBA program to list out distinct text with "[]" in each document. E.g.

I was not born in [New York], instead I was born in [LA], but I'm moving from [LA] to [New York]. But I love [San Francisco] the most.

The result should be:
New York
LA
San Francisco

Please help. This is very urgent! If not, I will have to go through the hundred documents...

Many Thanks.

werafa

Try using the maxcro recorder, and record a macro to perform a search for the words you are looking for.

then edit the macro to pass a true/false value, and read the file name property if true.

I am not very familiar with vba in word, but I also believe that vba can read the file names in a directory, and could therefore open them one by one, test for the presence of the search words, record the file name of test = true files in an array, and print the array to a spreadsheet, doc file or paper.

can anyone else add details?

LizzJ

ASKER

werafa,

You've got the idea half correct. I only want those text enclosed with square brackets, but i don't know exactly what those text are, so don't think macro can achieve this.

I found the following solution from a similar question just now. And now i'm able to search for the first content i want. But exactly, like what you mentioned, to loop through the whole document and also all these 100 documents one by one and print the text in a spreadsheet?

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
            With Selection.Find
                 .Text = "["
                 .Replacement.Text = ""
                 .Forward = True
                 .Wrap = wdFindContinue
             End With
            Selection.Find.Execute
            
            With Selection
                .StartIsActive = False
                .Extend Character:="]"
            End With
            Set rngHereIAm = Selection.Range
            'Ref = rngHereIAm.Text ' This would get the contents with the brackets
            Ref = Mid(rngHereIAm.Text, InStr(rngHereIAm.Text, "[") + 1, _
            (InStr(rngHereIAm.Text, "]") - (InStr(rngHereIAm.Text, "[") + 1)))
            Debug.Print Ref
          
            Ref = ""
            Set rngHereIAm = Nothing

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GrahamSkan

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LizzJ

ASKER

GrahamSkan,

This works perfect. Thanks a lot!