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Old 03-28-2012, 05:54 PM
dgalb dgalb is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows Vista Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2007
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Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure"
 
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Default Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure"

Word 2007, title says it all. Can I make the cross-reference say "Fig. 3.2" instead of "Figure 3.2" somehow? If I could make it only say Fig in the middle of the sentence, that would be great, but simply having the option to pick would be great.



The situation: Working on my thesis which has quite a few images. The school's 'preference' is to only use the abbreviation "Fig" in the middle of a sentence, but stick to "Figure" if it's the first word of the paragraph. Of course I could just relabel everything as "Fig" but then it doesn't look right on the page with the actual captions.

The dearth of solutions to this on Google leads me to think it can't be done, but I thought I'd ask.

Thanks for the help in advance!
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Old 03-29-2012, 05:46 AM
Isadora Isadora is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2007
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Select the image, right click > Caption > New Label and enter Fig.
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Old 03-29-2012, 04:42 PM
dgalb dgalb is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows Vista Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2007
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That will insert a new caption, yes. But then I have two captions showing, one reading "Fig. X.X" and one reading "Figure X.X blah blah". I want the image to keep the caption reading "Figure" but have the reference in the text read the caption "Fig.". Any ideas on how to do that?
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Old 03-30-2012, 05:10 AM
Isadora Isadora is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2007
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From my understanding, you can only change formatting.
Once you set up the caption as "Figure X.X", then if you recall it in the document (using cross references) you cannot edit the content (Figure X.X), just the formatting (as detailed here).
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Old 04-09-2012, 01:08 PM
bthis bthis is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 64bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 64bit
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Isadora View Post
From my understanding, you can only change formatting.
Once you set up the caption as "Figure X.X", then if you recall it in the document (using cross references) you cannot edit the content (Figure X.X), just the formatting (as detailed here).
You can do this easily. Click where you want to insert the reference and type "Fig. " and then insert the cross-reference by inserting the paragraph number only. As add figures you can update the figure numbers using F9, while the label remains "Fig."
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  #6  
Old 07-30-2012, 12:35 AM
jZ23B jZ23B is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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I also want to change Figure to Fig. throughout my long (already written) document and I'm somewhat stunned that this is not easy to do. As someone mentioned, formatting the labels can be done globally but not so with editing the labels? So, do I have this right: My 'best' option is to remove the label "Figure" from each reference so that the fields contain just the numbers and then I have to go back and manually type in "Fig." everywhere!? After 14 versions of Word, this is what I'm left with?
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Old 07-30-2012, 12:53 AM
Isadora Isadora is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jZ23B View Post
My 'best' option is to remove the label "Figure" from each reference so that the fields contain just the numbers and then I have to go back and manually type in "Fig." everywhere!? After 14 versions of Word, this is what I'm left with?
If you want to use Fig. and Figure, then you'd better make one fixed - e.g. the field being "Figure X", while for the others, the field would be "X" only, with "Fig." typed manually.

Word runs on a computer, it can't read your mind and guess when you want to use Fig. or Figure. Give him a rule, and it'll follow it 'til death, but don't ask it to guess your thoughts.
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Old 07-30-2012, 12:55 AM
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macropod macropod is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 64bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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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.
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Old 07-30-2012, 09:34 AM
jZ23B jZ23B is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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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.
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Old 07-30-2012, 03:28 PM
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macropod macropod is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 64bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jZ23B View Post
It would be next to trivial to have the representation of the label be different from the label itself
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.
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Old 07-30-2012, 04:28 PM
jZ23B jZ23B is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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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...
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Old 07-30-2012, 09:32 PM
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macropod macropod is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 64bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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Unfortunately, there's nothing in the field code you can edit. If you select one of the fields and press Shift-F9, you'll be able to see the field code - and it won't have 'Figure', 'Table' or any other indicator of the caption type. If you were to use Find/Replace on the field results, that would be ineffective, as the fields will revert to their original display as soon as anything causes the cross-references to update. The only way around that - and it could be useful when the document is at it's 'Final' stage, would be to edit the display via a macro, then either lock or unlink the fields. The following macro uses a 'lock' approach, so that the references can be updated later on (by re-running the macro) if need be:
Code:
Sub AbbreviateCaptions()
Dim Fld As Field
For Each Fld In ActiveDocument.Fields
  With Fld
    If Left(.Result.Text, 6) = "Figure" Then
      .Locked = False
      .Update
      .Result.Text = Replace(.Result.Text, "Figure", "Fig.", 1, 1)
      .Locked = True
    End If
  End With
Next
End Sub
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  #13  
Old 07-30-2012, 11:36 PM
jZ23B jZ23B is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 32bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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Hey, this macro is great and easy to extend to similar labels. Thanks a lot. I imagine lots of folks doing scientific writing with Word would find it useful.
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Old 08-30-2012, 04:00 AM
myusername myusername is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows XP Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2003
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Quote:
Originally Posted by macropod View Post
Unfortunately, there's nothing in the field code you can edit. If you select one of the fields and press Shift-F9, you'll be able to see the field code - and it won't have 'Figure', 'Table' or any other indicator of the caption type. If you were to use Find/Replace on the field results, that would be ineffective, as the fields will revert to their original display as soon as anything causes the cross-references to update. The only way around that - and it could be useful when the document is at it's 'Final' stage, would be to edit the display via a macro, then either lock or unlink the fields. The following macro uses a 'lock' approach, so that the references can be updated later on (by re-running the macro) if need be:
Code:
Sub AbbreviateCaptions()
Dim Fld As Field
For Each Fld In ActiveDocument.Fields
  With Fld
    If Left(.Result.Text, 6) = "Figure" Then
      .Locked = False
      .Update
      .Result.Text = Replace(.Result.Text, "Figure", "Fig.", 1, 1)
      .Locked = True
    End If
  End With
Next
End Sub
Thank you for the nice code. I found it useful. It is possible to the the same to also change the label at the figure captions. i.e. after application of the macro it says 'Figure 8' at the caption but 'Fig. 8' in the reference. Can the macro be modified to change the label in the figure caption too?
best regards
Nils
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  #15  
Old 08-30-2012, 04:20 AM
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macropod macropod is offline Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Windows 7 64bit Making cross-reference say "Fig." instead of "Figure" Office 2010 32bit
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Quote:
Originally Posted by myusername View Post
Thank you for the nice code. I found it useful. It is possible to the the same to also change the label at the figure captions. i.e. after application of the macro it says 'Figure 8' at the caption but 'Fig. 8' in the reference. Can the macro be modified to change the label in the figure caption too?
best regards
Nils
If you create a new caption label to say 'Fig.' instead of 'Figure', and use that when you insert the caption, that's how it will display - and you won't need the macro.
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