Hi Guessed

Here are the results of running the macro 5 times on a document of 500 pages:

Speedtest macro:

1) 216 seconds
2) 670 seconds
3) 572 seconds
4) 285 seconds
5) 458 seconds

Average: 440 seconds

Previous macro:

1) 799 seconds
2) 498 seconds
3) 629 seconds
4) 525 seconds
5) 500 seconds

Average: 590 seconds

So your latest code is definitely faster, but there's still a huge amount of variation in process time going on.

Interesting what you mentioned about dimensioning as well - I always thought that putting the 2 variants in the same line:

Dim shapecount, shapemax As Long

...would dim both as Long, so I've learned something new there.

By the way, I don't do these jobs every day, but when I do I often have 10 or more docs of 1000 pages each to do, so it's definitely worth me trying to shave as much time off the process as possible.