How to count the number of times a word repeats in a pages document?

The Pages Find command will locate the sought word in body text, text boxes, shapes, table cells, headers, and footers. I suggest that you select one instance of the word to be found and from the Edit menu > Find > Use Selection for Find. Then you can press ⌘+F to open the Find panel with the word already present.

You will need to click on the gear icon in the Find panel and choose the following if you expect that you will need case-insensitive word discovery, otherwise select Match Case:

You may need to click the right-arrow key once to get the nnn occurrences number to appear in the right-side of the Find input field.

Using ckuan's suggestio will work, but may prove tedious and subject to counting error with a lengthy document and many instances of the searched word.

Pressing command F, then entering the word to be searched will immediately highlight the first occurrence of the word (in bright yellow) and the rest of the occurrences (in dull grey), and you can scroll through thee document and count them row by row.

Note though that if you enter only the characters making up the word, a search for "the" will find that set of letters in that order in the, there, they, theft, weather, Athens, etc. That can be partially solved by including a space after the word, which, for the example, would eliminate all the false counts listed above, but would still include words like breathe if they were followed with a space. A better cure is to use the Find options to specify "Whole Words.

My initial count, using this method and counting the grey highlighted words was off by 1 (in a total count of 73).

You can also use the Find process as above, then step through the found copies of the word by repeatedly pressing command-G (Think "command-Go") and counting each press of the combination until the selection highlight jumps back to the top of the column and the first copy found.

Even more accurate (and quicker) is to:

Select all of the document content, press command-C to copy, open a new blank document, press command-V to paste.

In the View menu, choose Show word count, then take note of the number of words in the document, displayed in the lower left corner of the document window.

Then press command-F to open Find - Replace,

Choose Whole words and Find and Replace from the Find options.

In the Find box, enter the word to be found.

Leave the replace with box empty.

Click Replace all.

Read the Word count again and subtract the new count from the count taken before using find and replace.

The difference is the number of times the searched word appeared in that document.

Close the Find - Replace window, then press command-Z to undo the Replace All action, and return all copies of the searched word to their original locations in the document.

Regards,

Barry

PS: Working on a COPY of the document is not necessary, but is recommended, as it is possible to generate a situation where the Oops! key (command-Z) won't bring it all back—a case where you'll be happy to have used a copy to do the count.

B.

Use Command+F and search for the word, it will show the occurrence.

Aha!

So I misread ckuan's "…it will show the occurrence."

Thanks for the clarification, VikingOSX. Nice to see that ability has been added to recent Pages versions.

Regards,

Barry