Regular Expression Find and Replace (2003 SP1)

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I need to do a search and replace of a set of numbers running down the left side of my page. The regular expression ([0-9]{1,2}[.]) catches everything I need to change. Unfortunately, it catches other stuff too.

In particular, my documents has tables, and I want the regular expression to capture only things in the left hand column of each table. How do I get it to exclude stuff in the other columns?

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Find/Replace doesn’t “know” whether text is in the first column of a table.

You could write a macro that loops through the tables in the document, selects the first column of each table and performs the find/replace on the selection.

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If I did this, how would I get the macro to jump from one table to the next?

For example, I could record a series of tab keystrokes to move through the table, but how do I get Word to go from the last cell of one table to the first of the next?

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You don’t use Tabs etc., you loop through the tables:

Dim tbl As Table
Dim cel As Cell
For Each tbl In ActiveDocument.Tables
For Each cel In tbl.Columns(1).Cells
cel.Range.Find.Execute FindText:=”…”, ReplaceWith:=”…”, Replace:=wdReplaceOne
Next cel
Next tbl

You must substitute the correct find and replace text, of course.

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I don’t know if this will help, even if it works in 2003. If you hold down Alt while selecting with the left mouse button, you can select a rectangular “block” which is not constrained to the start and end of lines. You could perhaps select only the required table column and execute the search/ replace on the Selection only.

Alan

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This didn’t work – I think because I have several tables to change rather than one table.

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