Paul, i apologize for my ignorance and mislabeling. i thought that the fields were in fact word MERGEFIELDS.

in any event, as Graham deduced, i am attempting to take the items located in the left columns and replace them with the items in the right. the "%" are meant to simply be temporary placeholders for the final pass. they are done incrementally to attempt to avoid the 255 character find limit.

TheFormTool has a find and replace function (written in VBA) that allows one to copy the replace text to the clipboard and then highlight the find text thereafter....and it works with the pseudo mergefields. It however, does not have the ability to batch convert a set of documents simultaneously.

hope that helps clear up things a bit. again, any help is greatly appreciated. if nothing else, thank you Graham and Paul for all the talent that you share with others.