Word find all fields

In today’s article, we are thrilled to present you 3 quick ways to find all fields in your Word document.

By default, the fields we insert into Word document take the same text style as normal one. Therefore, you will find it hard to distinguish them from plain texts. This can leads to accidental editing or deletion of an important field. This article is dedicated to 3 quick workarounds to stand out fields.

Method 1: Alter the “Word Options”

Generally, you can see the gray shading when you hovering cursor over a field. Such shading is like a kind of identification for field. The good news is you can turn it on even the cursor is not over a field.

1. Firstly, click “File” tab.
2. Then click “Options” to open “Word Options” dialog box.
3. Next click “Advanced”.
4. Scroll down to the “Show document content” section. Find the “Field shading” option and choose “Always” instead of the default “When selected”.
5. Lastly, click “OK” to save the change.

You need to be aware that this modification affects globally. Not only fields on this document but all other ones now have field shading.

Method 2: Use “Find” Function

1. First and foremost, press “Alt+ F9” to show all field codes.
2. Next click “Home” tab and click the arrow button behind the “Find” command.
3. On the menu choose “Advanced Find” to trigger the “Find and Replace” dialog box.
4. Put cursor in “Find what” text box and enter “^d” to find all fields.
5. Next click “Find In” and choose “Main Document”.
6. You will see all fields are in selection now. You can choose to highlight them as to stand out.
7. Finally, press “Alt+ F9” to toggle from codes back to text.

Method 3: Highlight All Fields via VBA

1. To begin with, press “Alt+ F11” to quickly open VBA editor.
2. Under “Normal” project, click “Insert” and choose “Module” to create a new one.
3. Next double click to open the module as to bring out the editing area on the right side.
4. Then paste the bellowing codes on the module:

Sub ShowFieldsInDoc()
  Dim objField As Field
  Dim objDoc As Document
  Dim strCodeText As String
 
  Set objDoc = ActiveDocument
 
  With objDoc
    For Each objField In .Fields
      If objField.Type = wdFieldRef Or wdFieldPageRef Then
        objField.Select
        Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
      End If
      If objField.Type = wdFieldHyperlink Then
        objField.Select
        Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
      End If
    Next objField
  End With
End Sub

1. Last but not the least, click “Run”.

This macro highlight fields in yellow, but leave hyperlinks intact whose default style is easy to recognize enough.

How to Efficiently Recover from Broken Files

Nowadays, it’s not unusual to encounter with docx damage, since we use Word so often to process documents. And you have to understand that being panic or mournful has nothing to do with efficient file recovering. Once file damage occurs, your primary option should be getting a fixing tool.

Author Introduction:

Vera Chen is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including xlsx damage and pdf repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com

Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Finding Fields.

There may be times when you are working in a document and you want to search for fields that the document may contain. There are two very easy ways you can do this. The first is to go to the beginning of the document and simply press the F11 key. This causes Word to jump to the next field in the current document story, regardless of what that field does.

I should stop to explain what a story is. A story can be thought of as a portion of a document. The main document is a story, but there are other stories, as well. Common ones are the header, footer, footnotes, and endnotes. Pressing F11 will find the next field in the story in which the insertion pointer is located. Thus, pressing F11 if your insertion point is in the header will find the next field in the header. This means that you will need to place the insertion point in the story in which you want to find fields.

While pressing F11 may work great if you have only a couple of fields in a document, and they are in a single story, you can also use the Search capabilities in Word to search for fields. You do that by following these steps:

1. Press Alt+F9. This makes all the field codes in your document visible, instead of the results of those fields.
2. Press Ctrl+F. Word displays the Find dialog box (Word 2007) or the Navigation pane (later versions of Word).
3. In the Find What box (Word 2007) or the search box (later versions of Word), enter ^d as what you are searching for (make sure you use a lowercase d). This is the code that Word understands as «any field.»
4. Click on Find Next. Word locates the next occurrence of a field.

Notice step 1, which is required to make this method of searching for fields work. If you don’t display the field codes, Word can’t find the fields. Of course, you can always use the F11 method, which works whether they are displayed or not. (This seems very inconsistent to me. A field is a field, and should be found when searching for a field, whether it is displayed or not.)

One other inconsistency—the Search method will find fields regardless of the story in which they are located. Thus, it is a good choice if you have a lot of stories and each of those stories has fields with it.

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen…

It’s usually better to go the macro route when finding fields because, as you say, the find algorithm that Word uses doesn’t work the way you might hope with fields.

But if you know exactly what the fields contain, you can specify a search pattern that will probably work (however not in wildcard mode).

For example, if you want to look for figure number field pairs such as

{ STYLEREF 1 s }.{ SEQ Figure * ARABIC s 1 }

(which would typically be the same set of fields everywhere in the document)

If you only really need to look for the following:

{ STYLEREF 1 s }.<any field>

you could ensure that field codes are displayed and search for

^d STYLEREF 1 s ^21.^d

or

^19 STYLEREF 1 s ^21.^19

If you need to be more precise, you can spell out the second field as well.

«^d» only works for finding the field beginning, not the field end.

It’s a shame that ^w wants to find at least 1 whitespace character because otherwise it would be more robust to look for

^19^wSTYLEREF^w1^ws^w^21.^19

Perhaps someone else knows how to work around that without using wildcards?

Below the vertical scroll bar, there are three buttons: an up-arrow, a round thing, and a down-arrow.  Click on the middle one, which is “Select Browse Object” and can also be accessed as Alt+Ctrl+Home:

This gives you a 6×2 palette of browsable objects. 
Click on the {a}, which represents Fields.

Now “Next Find” (the down-arrow button,
also accessible as Ctrl+Page Down) and “Previous Find”
(the up-arrow button, also accessible as Ctrl+Page Up) become “Next Field” and “Previous Field”, respectively,
and you can use them to jump from field to field.

The other boxes in the palette let you search / navigate for endnotes, footnotes, comments, section breaks, pages, edits (go back to the last three places you made changes), headings, graphics, tables, and, of course, ordinary text find.

Short overview of field shortcuts — with names of related Word commands

The list below shows the same shortcuts as listed above. The rightmost column includes detailed descriptions of the individual shortcuts.