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.
4. Make sure the Text Only radio button is selected.
5. Click OK.

With normal fields, the above actions replace the field with the text displayed by the field. If it does not work with your particular situation, it may mean that you are not really working with fields; the third-party program is inserting something other than a field into your document. Your only recourse at that point is to rely on whatever information you may find from the technical support folks at the program's publisher.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (370) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Getting Rid of Fields Inserted by Third-Party Programs.