How can I check word frequency or keyword density in Microsoft Word?

Question

I'm working with longer documents in Microsoft Word and sometimes need to check which words are being repeated too often.

Word Count gives me the total number of words, but I haven't found a way to see a frequency table showing how many times each individual word appears or what percentage of the text it represents.

At the moment I can do this with a browser based tool like this https://textbases.app/text-tools/word-frequency-counter/

Is there a built-in way to get similar word-frequency or keyword-density statistics directly inside Microsoft Word or Microsoft 365, without copying the text into another tool?

If not, is there an add-in, macro, or other Word feature that would be the recommended way to do this?

It shows each word with its count and percentage and can exclude common words, which is basically the information I'm looking for.

Is there a built-in way to get similar word-frequency or keyword-density statistics directly inside Microsoft Word or Microsoft 365, without copying the text into another tool?

If not, is there an add-in, macro, or other Word feature that would be the recommended way to do this?

Answer 1

One example of a macro that displays the word frequencies in a Word document is in https://word.tips.net/T000879_Determining_Word_Frequency.html. It can be tweaked to create the output in the format you want, and to calculate the percentages in addition to the raw frequencies. Post back if you want help with that.

An internet search for "word frequency" will return pages with other macros.

Answer 2

If you have a tool that is working for you, it's probably best to stick with that, but a brute force approach would be to make a copy of your document and sort the entire thing alphabetically. You would first have to replace every paragraph break with a space, then replace every space with a paragraph break so you could sort by paragraphs. You could then scroll down the (incredibly long) sort results to see if certain words stick out. Obviously, most of the repeats will be common pronouns, prepositions, etc., so this wouldn't be very helpful.

Answer 3

There is no native process in Word to count word frequency, Microsoft have never added that functionality to Word, if you search online, there are some macro's provided to count the word density, I have not tested them so I do not know how well they work.