How can I reliably get the number of pages in a Word document?

Question

I am making lots of changes to a Word document using automation, and then running a VBA macro which - among other things - checks that the document is no more than a certain number of pages.

I'm using ActiveDocument.Information(wdNumberOfPagesInDocument) to get the number of pages, but this method is returning an incorrect result. I think this is because Word has not yet updated the pagination of the document to reflect the changes that I've made.

ActiveDocument.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticPages) also suffers from the same issue.

I've tried sticking in a call to ActiveDocument.Repaginate, but that makes no difference.

I did have some luck with adding a paragraph to the end of the document and then deleting it again - but that hack seems to no longer work (I've recently moved from Word 2003 to Word 2010).

Is there any way I can force Word to actually repaginate, and/or wait until the repagination is complete?

Answer 1

Try (maybe after ActiveDocument.Repaginate)

ActiveDocument.BuiltinDocumentProperties(wdPropertyPages)

It is causing my Word 2010 to spend half-second with "Counting words" status in status bar, while ActiveDocument.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticPages) returns the result immediately.

Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/185509

Answer 2

I just spent a good 2 hours trying to solve this, and I have yet to see this answer on any forum so I thought I would share it.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vba/word-vba/articles/pages-object-word?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

That gave me my solution combined with combing through the articles to find that most of the solutions people reference are not supported in the newest versions of Word. I don't know what version it changed in, but my assumption is that 2013 and newer can use this code to count pages:

ActiveDocument.ActiveWindow.Panes(1).Pages.Count.

I believe the way this works is ActiveDocument selects the file, ActiveWindow confirms that the file to be used is in the current window (in case the file is open in multiple windows from the view tab), Panes determines that if there is multiple windows/split panes/any other nonsense you want the "first" one to be evaluated, pages.count designates the pages object to be evaluated by counting the number of items in the collection.

Anyone more knowledgeable feel free to correct me, but this is the first method that gave me the correct page count on any document I tried!

Also I apologize but I cant figure out how to format that line into a code block. If the mods want to edit my comment to do that be my guest.

Answer 3

After you've made all your changes, you can use OnTime to force a slight delay before reading the page statistics.

Application.OnTime When:=Now + TimeValue("00:00:02"), _
        Name:="UpdateStats"

I would also update all the fields before this OnTime statement:

ActiveDocument.Range.Fields.Update

Answer 4

I found a possible workaround below, if not a real answer to the topic question. Yesterday, the first ComputeStatistics line below was returning the correct total of 31 pages, but today it returns only 1.

The solution is to get rid of the Content object and the correct number of pages is returned.

Dim docMultiple As Document
Set docMultiple = ActiveDocument 
lPageCount = docMultiple.Content.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticPages)  ' Returns 1
lPageCount = docMultiple.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticPages)  ' Returns correct count, 31

Answer 5

ActiveDocument.Range.Information(wdNumberOfPagesInDocument)

This works every time for me. It returns total physical pages in the word.

Answer 6

Dim wordapp As Object
Set wordapp = CreateObject("Word.Application")
Dim doc As Object
Set doc = wordapp.Documents.Open(oFile.Path)

Dim pagesCount As Integer
pagesCount = doc.Content.Information(4) 'wdNumberOfPagesInDocument
doc.Close False
Set doc = Nothing