Wednesday 8 August 2012

Unlinking Field Codes in MS Word

Field codes are a pain when they decide they need to automatically update and then delete all your content. For example when you are submitting a manuscript for publication and end up having to put content after your references which have been inserted by a reference manager. If the reference manager is not present the references and everything after them can disappear.

So top tip everybody, if you want to unlink your text, and delete the field codes, all you have to do is press:
CTRL+Shift+F9

I think that this will delete all field codes in the document, so if you suffer from the above scenario and want to keep adding references, beware that this solution will require you to manually type in any changes/additions to references.If it doesn't remove all codes and you want it too you can obviously try CTRL+A to select all first.

I love this tip, it saved me A LOT of grief!



P.S. Added tip if you are still having trouble, skimmed from a comment on a different website:

"Sometimes you can't select all with Ctrl-A (in Word 2007). Then you have to go to the Developer tab>Protect Document> Restrict Formatting and Editing. Then in the side bar that appears, click "Stop Protection".

For some reason, you have to do this even though the document was not protected in the first place!

Then you can Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-Shift-F9."

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