I'm looking for a simple way to delete repeated text in a Word 2007 document. If there are some shortcuts with the Find/Replace commands, I'm not seeing it. Otherwise, can someone recommend how I might write a macro that works like the following:
1- Select a block of text (could be mulitple paragraphs, have bullet points, etc).
2- Run the macro or do the command.
3- The macro or command deletes all instances of the selected text block.
Any insight here?
Selection.Text returns the current selection's text.
In principle, the syntax for your Replace command is:
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = Selection.Text
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
You replace by an empty string, thus delete every instance of the text to find.
But: You have to decide of course how to handle the formatting of the selected text, maybe have to analyze your selected block first because replacing might not work with control chars neglected by Selection.Text ... This is just the start, you need to specify what you want and then ask again, yourself or us. Meanwhile Record macro and the word vba reference are your friends.
For alpha number text (with out newlines), you can use Find/Replace however as soon as you get in the realm of bullets, new paragraphs, etc. it will no longer do exact matching. If you often need to do that, I would suggest using a program like LaTeX to write your documents. LaTeX would allow you do this style of exact matching of large blocks of text. If you're on a Windows machine, a great LaTeX package would be proTeXt which can be found at http://www.tug.org/protext/
I had exactly the same problem, huge mailing list and I just needed the emails. I solved it by copying the text in excel, filtering sentence by sentence (or bullets) the paragraph i wanted to remove and deleting all rows. Mine was more than 270 pages, worked just fine (as long as the text is not too long, it was a lot faster than replaceing sentence by sentence in word.) Or if it is an option, just filter with a text filter - begins with "to:" , then you are done in 10 secs. Hope it helps.
