Find and Replace Question--Word 2003

[Joe McGuire]

I have a series of large legal documents with numbered paragraphs that I
must now renumber since a paragraph or two had to be removed. (Yes,
automatic numbering woud be an easy answer but for several reasons it's not
a practical solution as each document becomes a template of sorts for
subsequent ones. It's a long story) I use Find and replace quite a bit,
including with wild cards, but for other purposes. Is there a way using
Find and replace to do this? Finding each number is simple enough, but I am
having trouble figuring out exactly how to replace it with a number, in this
case, 1 digit less than the original number. If I only had to do this once
I'd just slog through it changing one at a time. But I run into this fairly
often, because paragraphs are removed or added, thus throwing all the
subsequent numbering off.. I would appreciate any suggestions

 

[Stefan Blom]

Perhaps a macro could do this? Ask in a programming newsgroup such as
microsoft.public.word.vba.general.