Is there a way to set so many words per page?

M

Marcie

My friend is writing a play and needs to have 300 words per page. Is there
any way to set this up in Word?
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

In general, screenplays seem to require a lot of things that Word isn't
so great at doing, and there's certainly no easy checkbox to tell Word
"I want 300 words per page". Dedicated screenplay software exists for a
reason, and I'd suggest your friend try out some of those programs.

You might also Google for screenplay template or search here, in case
something has been set up that works.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx

Someone else may have a better answer, though.
 
M

Marcie

Thank you. I gave this information to him. Maybe someone else might still
have a suggestion on how to do this in Word. Thanks for trying.
 
G

Graham Mayor

As Daiya suggests there is no easy way of setting up Word to limit the page
length to only three hundred (or any other number) words. There are a number
of problems, not least of which are the random spacing of proportional fonts
and the definition of what Word actually considers to be a 'word'. You
cannot for example simply move the cursor along three hundreds 'words' and
insert a break.

The following macro will locate and insert a page break at the start of
every 300th word, but the macro is slow and clumsy because of the loops, so
I have cross posted the reply to the vba forum where better programmers
than me may be able to refine it.

Even as it stands it will insert page breaks leaving 300 words per page,
which, if you double space the text and set the margins appropriately should
fill the 'pages' with 300 words. However, if you then add or remove words
during a later stage of editing, all the breaks will be in the wrong places,
so you would have to remove all the breaks from the document and re-run the
macro.

As you can see, Word is not the best tool for this job:

Sub Test5()
Dim i As Long
Dim iPages As Integer
Dim iCount As Long
iPages = ActiveDocument.Range.Words.Count
iPages = iPages / 300
iCount = 1
Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
Do Until iCount = iPages
With Selection.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.ClearFormatting
.Text = "<[0-9a-zA-Z]"
.Replacement.Text = "^&"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = True
End With
For i = 1 To 301
Selection.Find.Execute
Next i
With Selection
.MoveLeft wdCharacter
.InsertBreak wdPageBreak
End With
iCount = iCount + 1
Loop
End Sub


http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm


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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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