Find And Highlight Duplicate Paragraphs In Research Article or Thesis

Suppose you have a large research article or thesis in word document format which may have hundreds of pages. As part of editing, you want to check if there are duplicate paragraphs and then highlight to make them outstanding, so that you can deal with the duplicate sentences.

To do the same, we use a VBA (Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window) code.

• For activating VBA code in Microsoft word. Open your desired word file and press Alt+F11 in your keyboard. Thus will open the VBA window.
• Click Insert > Module. This will open another window.
• Copy and paste below code into the opened blank module

Sub highlightdup()
    Dim I, J As Long
    Dim xRngFind, xRng As Range
    Dim xStrFind, xStr As String
    Options.DefaultHighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    With ActiveDocument
        For I = 1 To .Paragraphs.Count - 1
            Set xRngFind = .Paragraphs(I).Range
            If xRngFind.HighlightColorIndex <> wdYellow Then
                For J = I + 1 To .Paragraphs.Count
                    Set xRng = .Paragraphs(J).Range
                    If xRngFind.Text = xRng.Text Then
                        xRngFind.HighlightColorIndex = wdBrightGreen
                        xRng.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
                    End If
                Next
            End If
        Next
    End With
End Sub

• Now, press F5 key to run this code, all the duplicate sentences are highlighted at once, the first displayed duplicate paragraphs are highlighted with green color, and other duplicates are highlighted with yellow color.

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