Replacing punctuation marks with footnotes

nufc89 · #1 05-21-2015, 06:00 PM

Dear Geniuses,

I am trying to operate the FIND/REPLACE function to automatically insert 400 footnotes at once.

When I write, I mark each citation or cited fact with an apostrophe (for example, John Smith, Historian, claims that ww2 'was inevitable from 1919'.) Instead of going through and adding footnotes by hand, I am trying to FIND (ctrl + f) all the apostrophes and replace them with footnotes. I have tried using the ^f in the REPLACE WITH box. The error message reads that it is not "valid special character for the replace with box".

Thanks!

gmayor · #2 05-21-2015, 10:13 PM

If you want to mark the areas where the quoted text was with a footnote reference and use the quoted text as the reference text you cannot do this with Find and Replace. You can do it with a macro e.g. as follows http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm but the macro may have problems distinguishing between single quotes and apostrophes. See how you get on with the macro on a COPY of the document.

The macro assumes straight quotes rather than smart quotes.

Code:

Sub ReplaceWithFootnotes()
'Macro by G Mayor 22 May 2015
Dim oRng As Range
Dim strNote As String
    Set oRng = ActiveDocument.Range
    With oRng.Find
        Do While .Execute(FindText:="[!A-Za-z0-9]'[A-Za-z0-9]", _
                          MatchWildcards:=True)
            oRng.MoveEndUntil Chr(39)
            oRng.End = oRng.End + 1
            strNote = Replace(oRng.Text, Chr(39), "")
            oRng.Text = ""
            ActiveDocument.Footnotes.Add oRng, , strNote
            oRng.Collapse 0
        Loop
    End With
lbl_Exit:
    Set oRng = Nothing
    Exit Sub
End Sub

nufc89 · #3 05-22-2015, 03:15 PM

I have created the macro (though it took a bit of working out how), but when I run it in a document (in which it is saved), nothing happens. No luck unfortunately. Could you send me a script for something that changes the number 77 into footnotes to see if it works?

Theoretically, could you send the pre-packaged macro ready-made as an attachment?

Thanks

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