BANGALORE, INDIA: A macro is a rule or a pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure.These are a series of commands that are recorded so they can be played back, or executed later. 

All of us have used Microsoft's Word at one time or the other, but few of us know or realize that there is a provision for writing our own code and implement them in Word. Recently, while doing a research project, I was stuck at a point where I had a huge amount of written data required to be analyzed, more specifically I had to find out individual occurrence of some words in the whole document.

This was manually impossible and not practical since the Word document was nearly 13,000 pages long and had more than 4 million words. I was left with the choice of installing Linux and then use their fabulous feature that would have let me do it easily. However, this was not possible as I hardly had any disk space left for a new partition to install Linux on. That is when I decided to use this wonderful feature in Microsoft Word. I will be using MS Word 2007 to explain the process.

Initializing the Developer Tab

Click on the Microsoft Office icon on the top left hand corner of the word document screen. Click on 'Word Options'. In the 'Popular' Tab, choose 'Show Developer Tab in The Ribbon', if not already selected. This will show a new tab in the toolbar called 'Developer.'

Setting up the macro
The following steps show how to record and save a macro:

• Click on 'Record Macro', a dialogue box will open.
• Name your macro (let it be 'test'), assign it as a button or keyboard shortcut.
• Select 'Normal.dotm' from the drop down list.
• Selecting the 'Button' option opens up a new dialogue box.
• Select 'Normal.NewMacros.test' and click on add.
• Under 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar', we can see that our macro has been added.
• Select the macro created and click on the 'Modify' button, a box opens up; select any icon for the macro and change its name(if you want to).
• Click 'OK'.
• We can see that the icon (i chose the yellow smiley) has been added at the topmost toolbar.
• Click on 'Stop Recording'.
• Now, that everything is set, click the 'macros' button in the 'Developer' tab.
• Select your macro (test) and click on 'Edit'.
• A VB editor opens up. This is where we have to write or code our macro between 'Sub' and 'End Sub'.
• Write the code, save it and close the editor. We are ready to go.
• Coding the macro
  Const word_limit = 9000 'Maximum unique words allowed
  Dim Word_s As String 'Raw word pulled from doc
  Dim Words(word_limit) As String 'Array to hold unique words
  Dim occur_unique(word_limit) As Integer ' counter for unique words
  Dim Counter_word As Integer 'Number of unique words
  Dim Byoccur_unique As Boolean 'Flag for sorting order
  Dim total_words As Long 'Total words in the document
  Dim not_find As String Words to be excluded
  Dim Found As Boolean 'Temporary flag
  Dim j, k, l, Temp As Integer 'Temporary variables
  Dim choice As String 'How user wants to sort results
  Dim tword As String '

Set up excluded words
 not_find="[the][a][of][is][to][for][by][be][and][are][i][was][were]"