Why do you suppose Word should allow you to have something different in the cross-reference than the very thing you're cross-referencing? As indicated by bthis, you can, if you want, type the 'Fig.' and insert a cross-reference to only the figure number.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

It would be next to trivial to have the representation of the label be different from the label itself, that way you could globally change not just the styling but the actual text of the label. The recommendation to use only numbers in the field and precede it by static text is ill-suited for large Word documents since search and replace on a word as common as "fig" would be a major pain since you still have to check each one for accuracy.

Note that my complaint is not uncommon in scientific writing. Different journals have different (and very rigid) guidelines for how you refer to things and you often have to change stupid things like how figures/tables/citations are represented.

In hind sight it seems like a "best" practice for using Word would be to precede the figure number by some unique made-up word like erugif (i.e., figure backwards) then right before I submit my paper to the journal I would replace all fields with static text, search on "erugif" and replace each with the appropriate FIG, Fig., Figure,... The kind of thing I would do in LaTex, but was hoping to avoid.

I'm sorry, but that just shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what would be involved. MS would have to know the author's preferred abbreviations of every possible caption label in every supported language. As I'm sure you know, even in English there is more than one possible abbreviation for many words. Since captions can have, not only the default labels, but also user-defined ones, how is a field code supposed to determine which is the correct one? I suspect that's the reason why MS hasn't tried to be more creative than to give you the option of having just the label number and let you use whatever abbreviations you prefer.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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...