Writing Word Macros, Second Edition

Example: Finding Used Styles

As discussed earlier, Word considers a custom style to be in use even if no current text is formatted with that style. However, whenever I turn in a manuscript for a book, the production editors always want a list of all of the paragraph styles that I really used in that manuscript. They don’t care about styles that I might have used and then removed.

There are actually a couple of ways you could create such a list. One way would be to start with a list of all InUse styles. Then you could go through the document looking at the styles of each paragraph, checking off those styles on your list. However, there may be several thousand paragraphs in a document, and you would have to search the style list each time. This might be a bit slow.

Alternatively, you could cycle through the document, recording the style of each paragraph in a string array. Then you would need to eliminate the duplicates, which is most efficiently done if the array is sorted. The code in Example 12-7 (which lists only paragraph styles) takes this approach. It provides a good example of manipulating arrays.

Example 12-7. Finding Used Styles in a Document

Sub FindUsedStyles() Dim sAllStyles() As String Dim sUsedStyles() As String Dim i As Long Dim idx As Long Dim cParas As Long Dim cUsedStyles As Long Dim sPrevStyle As String Dim para As Paragraph ' Count of paragraphs in document cParas = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.Count ' Redim array to correct size ReDim sAllStyles(1 To cParas) ' Collect ...