I have a macro I've been using that cleans up documents. For instance, for the sentence "This is like X i.e. which is like Y", my macro adds commas before and after "i.e.": "This is like X, i.e., which is like Y".

This macro has the following code at the beginning:

I have determined what "ClearFormatting" does, but why do I have two statements in a row like this, and what does "Replacement" add?



(The macro works fine, but I added something before these lines, and went to comment these lines...only to realize I'm not sure what they do.)

Those two lines remove any possible remnants of formatting from the Find and Replace dialog before you set the new search parameters. This is necessary sometimes if a previous find and replace was performed and you had set a particular format to go along with either the find string or the replace with. For example, if you did a search for the word Title and only wanted to find the instances that were bold and then you wanted to assign it as a Heading 1 style then the bold would be a find format and the style setting would be a find.replacement format.

Those settings are sticky - which means the settings are remembered if you close the dialog and then later re-open it without restarting Word.

Those lines of code remove those format settings to the find/replace doesn't retain anything you forgot about.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you very much. That is a great explanation and I have commented my file accordingly.



I will keep this in mind for my other programs too.