You understood my "erugif" example, right? It basically solves the problem in a crummy, inelegant way. If I had defined my own label "erugif" when I first composed the manuscript and used it instead of "Figure" then it would be trivial to search and replace it with whatever label the journal demanded. I'd have to remove the field codes but that's trivial thanks to a macro on this site (that I think you may have written?). It seems like the folks at microsoft could figure out a way to do this that avoided my "erugif" crutch. I agree that mixing and matching labels would be more difficult, say half of the labels in the document are "Fig." and the other half are "Figure", but that's not what I'm talking about. having never written a macro (but plenty of other code) is it really impossible to write one that goes through all the field codes and changes the one's that say "Figure" to "Fig." (or vice versa). Obviously it's important to do this in the field codes so that you don't also change "figurehead", "Go Figure!", "fig newton", "figurer", etc...