Too late for that I am afraid; too many instances to change manually
Thank you for your fast reply
Nils

Even so, if you replace 'Figure' with 'Fig.' on all the captions (which you can do with Find/Replace, setting the Find Style to 'Caption'), you still won't need the macro - simply do Ctrl-A, F9 to update all the cross-references.

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

Hi,
Thanks for that code, excellent :-) I had the same problem and cant believe MS Word still has no solution for this. A simple character mask would suffice. However the code solves the issue and I've made some enhancements to suit my own requirements.
Table 1.1: > Table 1.1
Figure 1.1: > Fig. 1.1
There are two procedures, one to abbreviate and the other to normalize.

Sub AbbreviateCaptions()
Dim Fld As Field
For Each Fld In ActiveDocument.Fields
With Fld
If Left(.Result.Text, 6) = "Figure" And Right(.Result.Text, 1) = ":" Then
.Locked = False
.Update
.Result.Text = Replace(.Result.Text, "Figure", "Fig.", 1, 1)
.Result.Text = Replace(.Result.Text, ":", "", 1, 1)
.Locked = True
End If
If Left(.Result.Text, 5) = "Table" And Right(.Result.Text, 1) = ":" Then
.Locked = False
.Update
.Result.Text = Replace(.Result.Text, ":", "", 1, 1)
.Locked = True
End If
End With
Next
End Sub


Sub NormalizeCaptions()
Dim Fld As Field
For Each Fld In ActiveDocument.Fields
With Fld
If Left(.Result.Text, 4) = "Fig." Then
.Locked = False
.Update
End If
If Left(.Result.Text, 5) = "Table" Then
.Locked = False
.Update
End If
End With
Next
End Sub