Getting Rid of Fields Inserted by Third-Party Programs

Carole works at a company where the authors sometimes use automatic bibliographical programs (such as one called 'Endnote') to format and link their reference list to their textual citations. The software inserts fields in the Word document that are linked to the reference list. The problem is that the document is then difficult to edit or correct, and Carole is looking for a way to change the fields to text. She's tried selecting a field and pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9, but this does not seem to work on the fields inserted by the bibliographical program.

It's hard to tell, exactly, what the bibliographical program is really inserting in the document. The best bet might be to contact the program's publisher and ask their technical support team how to do the conversion. (Surely they've had this question before about their program?)

One thing you can try is to follow these steps:

1. Highlight the field. (Make sure the entire field is selected, and not just part of the field.)
2. Press Ctrl+C to copy the field to the Clipboard.
3. With the field still selected, choose Paste Special from the Edit menu. Word displays the Paste Special dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Make sure the Unformatted Text option is selected.
5. Click OK.

With normal fields, the above actions will replace the field with the text displayed by the field. If it does not work with your particular situation, you may be forced to rely on whatever the technical support folks at the publisher tell you.