Hi Greg,

It depends on what you mean by "efficient"...

The primary aim is to have the program do the required task reliably. The
secondary aim is to do this as fast as possible. The reason that speed is
only the secondary aim is because it is usless for a program to do the wrong
thing very quickly!

Based on your description, it appears that you have two methionds of
achieving the same effect. In Word, this is a very common situation, and it
often happens that there are even more than two ways of doing many things.
In such a situation, the following considerations are worth considering

1. Which method runs faster?
2. Do any methods result in additional side-effects?
3. Will one method work correctly in a wider range of conditions?
4. Is any method easier to code than the others?

These points are not listed in order of importance, because the order of
importance will change from case to case.

Regarding speed, it might or might not be important depending on what you
are doing and how often it is repeated. A routine that takes 0.1s to run is
not going to benefit greatly from optimisation unless it is run repeately
inside a loop.

Side-effects are hard to discuss generally, byt the most obvious one in the
example you have given is that one method moves the selection point while
the other does not. Only you can decide whether that is an important
side-effect. If it is, and you still decide for other reasons that using the
Selection is a good idea, you can always restore the selection to its
original position by using code like this

Dim oStart as Range
Set oStart = Selection.Range

' your code here

oStart.Select

Wider ranges of conditions are also hard to talk about, and in many cases
there is no different between methods.

Ease of coding is entirely subjective, and depends on your familiarity with
different objects and methods and coding styles. If you have code that
works, whether written by you or someone else, it is usually easier to use
it than to go in for wheel-reinvention.

Hi Greg,

if it comes to speed, how about this one?

Of course, I have omitted some stuff,
and the variable names are really very short, ;-)
as I am just playing around, too.

Sub SpeedSpeed()
Dim p As Paragraph ' object paragraph
Dim r As Range     ' range of word
Dim i As Integer   ' counter of words
Dim s As String    ' string of word
s = "let "
For Each p In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
 i = 0
 For Each r In p.Range.Words
  If s = r Then
     i = i + 1
     r.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseStart
     r.Text = CStr(i)
     r.Font.Superscript = True
  End If
  Next
Next
End Sub

Greetings from Bavaria, Germany
Helmut Weber, MVP
"red.sys" & chr(64) & "t-online.de"
Word 2002, Windows 2000