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Is there any way to get the total page count after selecting multiple word documents in a folder?

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3 Answers 3

Hopefully this will enlighten you a little further than the rather brief answer provided by another user.

Simple answer: no.

Detailed answer: A MS Word document only has "pages" once it is generated (i.e. opened). The main reason for this is to do with the page size. For example: if you have three documents under scrutiny, formatted to sizes A5, A4 & A3 respectively, then to count the number of pages collectively would be practically impossible to display in a simple, logical / coherent format.

The only potential way around this is to write some custom software which opens each desired document one after the other, logs the page sizes of each respective document, and then counts the number of pages within each page size category and logs it before closing each document and proceeding to the next.

Hopefully this will be of help to you.

Many thanks.


Adam's response (Nov 22 '12 at 15:08) is also somewhat correct and I feel that I should elaborate on my answer; Word does store a page count for some document types, but not all, as Adam quite rightly states. I chose to treat this factor as an 'all or nothing' property; either it stores a page count for all document types, or none at all. Hence why if you extract the page count property from each document, it may result in incorrect / inaccurate data due to particular file types not being read. This is why my suggestion of custom software would be the best overall option as the data can become stale or inaccurate and not always reflect the facts. This is why it is better to consider Word as not storing any page number properties rather than just some.

I hope this also helps?

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Thanks for the info. I don't suppose you have a link to any such custom software? –  Paul Spangle Nov 20 '12 at 11:57
I'm afraid not; however, the logic behind the software should not be too difficult to implement. The software is required to look in a directory, locate all .doc / .docx files and then from there, open the document, log the number of pages (if you wish to include page size here, it will require more detailed analysis of the document), add the total to a running count for each page size, then close the document and move onto the next until all have been analysed. –  SnookerFan Nov 20 '12 at 15:09
@SnookerFan please don't harass users to accept an answer, and please don't abuse flags to ask moderators to do so on your behalf. The choice to select an answer is entirely the user's; if they don't want to select an answer, they don't have to. I'm sure it's no coincidence that your sudden and intense interest in this user marking their solution is not coincidental. Don't worry about 15 points - just acknowledge that sometimes people don't mark an accepted answer, and your time is better spent writing new answers than begging for a checkmark on an answer from a year ago. –  nhinkle Oct 21 '13 at 8:46
Not coincidental in relation to what, exactly? –  SnookerFan Oct 21 '13 at 10:12
Has this worked? –  SnookerFan Nov 22 '13 at 10:16

This same question came up at work and Google brought me here. There isn't a way to select the documents in Windows Explorer and obtain a page count, but there are other methods that might provide a good enough estimate.

I'm thinking of trying out this PowerShell script: Hey, Scripting Guy! How Do I Count the Number of Pages in a Group of Office Word Documents? For an end user I would set up a shortcut and maybe prompt for the folder location.

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SnookerFan's detailed answer is a little off, Microsoft Word does store the number of pages in a document as a document property when the document is saved. This value is what shows up in the explorer when you view the properties of the file and it should be correct 99% of the time although I'm sure there are some situations where the value of this property could become stale and incorrect.

Therefore you could create a simple application and even make it into a shell plugin to query this property and add the values together.

One thing to keep in mind is this property is displayed for DOC and DOCX documents but isn't for RTF format even though it is written to the RTF document (represented by the {\nofpagesX} keyword).

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