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 document, regardless of what that field does.

While this may work great if you have only a couple of fields in a document, 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. Choose Find from the Edit menu, or simply press Ctrl+F. This displays the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
3. In the Find What box, 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.)