Select all paragraphs containing a given word or symbol [paragraph gathering]

No, Word can't do that directly.

Without a macro, you can highlight just the search term wherever it appears, by using the search box in the Navigation pane and viewing the Results tab there. Then you would have to click each result, select its paragraph, and copy/paste it.

With a macro, you can easily accomplish the job -- but not by selecting all the occurrences at once, because Word macros cannot make discontiguous selections in a document. Instead, the macro can copy the paragraph as each occurrence is found in a loop.

The following is a bare-bones macro that illustrates the technique. With more code, the search can be made to offer all the options that are available in the Advanced Find dialog.

Sub CopyFoundParagraphs()

    Dim sourceDoc As Document

    Dim destDoc As Document

    Dim srchRg As Range

    Dim copyRg As Range

    Dim searchTerm As String

    Dim count As Long

    searchTerm = InputBox("Enter word or phrase to find:", "Search Term")

    If searchTerm = "" Then Exit Sub

    Set sourceDoc = ActiveDocument

    Set destDoc = Documents.Add

    Set srchRg = sourceDoc.Range

    count = 0

    With srchRg.Find

        .Text = searchTerm

        While .Execute

            count = count + 1

            Set copyRg = destDoc.Range

            copyRg.Collapse wdCollapseEnd

            copyRg.FormattedText = srchRg.Paragraphs(1).Range.FormattedText

        Wend

    End With

    If count = 0 Then

        destDoc.Range.Text = "No instances found"

    End If

End Sub

Thanks much for the macro, Doug.

When I run it I get an error message about variable not set at the line

copyRg.FormattedText = rngfound.FormattedText

I wasn't using Headings 1...

So it works as intended and this is very useful.

I don't understand how the hundreds of repetitions can happen -- there must be something about either the text in your document or the text you told the macro to search for that I'm not accounting for. Could you upload your test file to a sharing site such as Dropbox or OneDrive, and post a link here for downloading it?

I gather that when you say "headings and their contents" you mean a heading and all the text below it, down to but not including the next heading at the same level. I haven't looked at that situation before, so I'm not sure how much work it will be. It sounds like it should be handled by Outline view, but a quick test shows that it doesn't quite work that way. I'll experiment over the next day or two to see what can be done.

It works, and I really appreciate it.

One problem is when the query word is in a heading. In this case the macro copies the heading and its content many times (from a 10 pages test file it created a 500 pages file).

I can easily make sure it doesn't happen so it's not a problem. But it brings me to what I ideally would like to do: gathering not paragraphs but headings and their contents. Say I have the * symbol in 3 of my headings (not in the text). I ran your macro and the 3 heading titles containing the * were correctly extracted. How difficult would it be to have their content copied as well? 

PS: I ran the macro in Outline mode showing headings only and it works differently: the 3 headings titles are still copied but curiously also parts of the text (even though there is no * in the text itself).