Take the 2-minute tour ×



cat 23

said 15

jumped 12

dog 7


I appreciate the answers regarding VBA macros, but I was hoping for a readily available tool (open source, shareware or commercial) that can handle this task.

share|improve this question
add comment

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Apart from VBA, one can develop such an application using API of OpenOffice to read the contents of the Word document; process it and export the results as a CSV file to open in a spreadsheet application.

However it's actually just a few line of codes if you're familiar with any programming language. For example in Python you can easily do it like that:

Here we define a simple function which counts words given a list

def countWords(a_list):
    words = {}
    for i in range(len(a_list)):
        item = a_list[i]
        count = a_list.count(item)
        words[item] = count
    return sorted(words.items(), key = lambda item: item[1], reverse=True)

The rest is to manipulate the content of the document.First paste it:

content = """This is the content of the word document. Just copy paste it. 
It can be very very very very long and it can contain punctuation 
(they will be ignored) and numbers like 123 and 4567 (they will be counted)."""

Here we remove the punctuation, EOL, parentheses etc. and then generate a word list for our function:

import re

cleanContent = re.sub('[^a-zA-Z0-9]',' ', content)

wordList = cleanContent.lower().split()

Then we run our function and store its result (word-count pairs) in another list and print the results:

result = countWords(wordList)

for words in result:

So the result is:

('very', 4)
('and', 3)
('it', 3)
('be', 3)
('they', 2)
('will', 2)
('can', 2)
('the', 2)
('ignored', 1)
('just', 1)
('is', 1)
('numbers', 1)
('punctuation', 1)
('long', 1)
('content', 1)
('document', 1)
('123', 1)
('4567', 1)
('copy', 1)
('paste', 1)
('word', 1)
('like', 1)
('this', 1)
('of', 1)
('contain', 1)
('counted', 1)

You can remove parentheses and comma using search/replace if you want.

All you need to do download Python 3, install it, open IDLE (comes with Python), replace the content of your word document and run the commands one at a time and in the given order.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Use VBA; a script to do exactly what you request is towards the bottom of this page.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


