Word 2003 Using Find to locate field brackets

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Guest

In a long document with lots of fields, I noticed an occurrence of the
beginning and ending brackets {} but no field codes inside them.

Is there a way to search for these empty field brackets without looking
at every instance of a legitimate field?

Thanks for anyone's help.
Kathryn M
 
Kathryn said:
In a long document with lots of fields, I noticed an occurrence of
the beginning and ending brackets {} but no field codes inside them.

Is there a way to search for these empty field brackets without
looking at every instance of a legitimate field?

Thanks for anyone's help.
Click to expand...

Hi Kathryn,

There may be a way, although it isn't perfect.

I'll assume that the empty field brackets were created by you (or someone)
pressing Ctrl+F9. (The only other ways I know of to get them are to edit a
field code and remove its contents, or to use a poorly written macro. Both
of these are improbable.) I'll also assume that all the legitimate fields
were inserted by the Insert > Field dialog and haven't been hand-edited
since then.

In that case, you can press Alt+F9 to display all field codes, and then use
Find or Replace to look for ^d followed by two spaces. The ^d finds the
opening field bracket. All legitimate field codes have one space after that
bracket, and then the code's keyword. There's another space preceding the
closing bracket. The "empty" field has just the two spaces between the
brackets.
 
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