Finding Special characters in Textboxes

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I am trying to find (Word 2000) thin spaces in a file, but it does not find those within textboxes contained in the file. What is the solution?

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What do I do for linked text boxes which contain long tables which exceed one page in size? Converting them to frames does not help.

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Rajesh,

I was about to try for a macro to do this, but it looks like the following works:

Click insertion point at the beginning of the first linked textbox. Do a Find/Replace All from there – this will run through the entire group of linked textboxes in one pass.

Just out of curiosity – how are you inserting a thin space, and how are you doing a find on it?

Gary

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Thanks, Gary, for your valuable input.

I know I need to go to every group of linked textboxes and do it — that is what I did ultimately. That was the pain I wanted to avoid, because I wanted to create a macro which could run on a batch of Word 2000 files and remove thin spaces which are not supported in Word 97, and save as RTF for conversion to Word 97.

A thin space is Unicode No 8197 (in ANSI, both a thin space and a keyboard space have place value of 32) and pasting a thin space from Clipboard into the Find Box seems to work.

Replacng a thin space is another problem. I use ^c in the replace box after copying a thin space to clipboard before running the s & r operation — clumsy, but it works.

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Hi,

In case it’s any help, the following macro can be used to do Find/Replaces in all textboxes in a document; however it will error if any of the textboxes are grouped.

Sub GetToTextBoxText()
'Gary Frieder  April 2001
'Warning: this code will error if there are grouped text boxes
Dim aShape As Shape
Dim objTxtRng As Range
For Each aShape In ActiveDocument.Shapes
    Set objTxtRng = aShape.TextFrame.TextRange
        With objTxtRng
            With .Find
                .ClearFormatting
                .Replacement.ClearFormatting
                .Text = "FindText"
                .Replacement.Text = "ReplaceText"
                .Forward = True
                .Wrap = wdFindContinue
                .Format = False
                .MatchCase = False
                .MatchWholeWord = False
                .MatchWildcards = False
                .MatchSoundsLike = False
                .MatchAllWordForms = False
                .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
            End With
        End With
Next aShape
End Sub

Gary

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Thanks a heap, yet again, Gary

I will try out this macro ASAP.

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You should be able to do this via a macro, where you set a range to the wdTextFrameStory and then do the find on that range.
(I’ll try to post a code sample when I get a few moments later, if that helps.)
(And I also remember an earlier macro that did something like this, that ran into complications when it encountered grouped textboxes – not sure what complications linked textboxes might introduce…)

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