Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Finding Fields.

Finding Fields

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 4, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


1

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. Word displays the Find dialog box.
  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.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1112) 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: Finding Fields.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

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. ...

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2017-02-26 20:29:01

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I need to search in Word for all italic type and replace the start and end italics with XML tags. Is there a way to do this globally on a large document?


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