Editing field properties

[stephenc]

Hi everyone,
I need to change the properties of a lot of StyleRef fields, but am not sure
how to go about it. Where a StyleRef refers to "Heading 1" I need it to refer
to "Heading 2". The fields are mainly in headers and footers, but could be
anywhere in a document.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The first step is to press Alt+F9 to display all the field codes in the
document.

The StyleRef field codes will probably look like

{ STYLEREF "Heading 1" \* MERGEFORMAT }

although the keywords may be lower case or mixed case if some of the fields
were created manually instead of using the Insert Field dialog.

Open the Replace dialog, click the More button, and check the "Use
wildcards" box. Put the following expression in the Find What box:

(STYLEREF*Heading) 1

and put this one in the Replace With box:

\1 2

Be careful to include the spaces in the expressions, or use copy/paste from
this post. Make sure the Search dropdown is set to All, and click the
Replace All button. This will search all the areas of the document,
including headers and footers.

If some of the field codes are lower case or mixed case, you'll need to
repeat the replacement with the matching case in the Find What box; wildcard
searches are always case-sensitive.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[stephenc]

Thanks for helping me, Jay. I really appreciate it.

 

[stephenc]

I've not used Replace to work with fields before. Just out of interest, what
is the construct for replacing the style name? For example, if I wanted to
change "Heading 1" to "Contents"?

 

[Jay Freedman]

For the Find What box, use the expression

(STYLEREF*)Heading 1

For the Replace With box, use

\1Contents

The (STYLEREF*) part of the search expression will match the word STYLEREF
plus the space and quote mark, and that will be used as the value of the \1
in the replacement expression.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[stephenc]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I've since spent some time playing around
with this in VBA, to really understand what Find|Replace can do with fields.