How to format all captions in a Word document?

[scorpio_oz]

I am working on a Word document with multiple authors and everyone is doing their own thing for figures and captions. Formatting could have the caption above or below the item. They may do either as an example...



Figure 1: <Text>

or

Figure 1<Tab><Text>

Is there a way to select all captions and format them identically? I have a caption style but that doesn't appear to be able to remove ':" and characters or tabs, etc.

[Charles Kenyon]

There is no straight forward or automatic way to do this. Anything with macros is going to take more work than doing it manually.

You can use the Replace feature to get rid of the colons and can use the Find feature to skip from caption to caption. You are looking for things that use the Caption Style. If you use replace, make sure to replace with blank using the Caption Style as well. See the first screenshot below. If your authors simply typed the captions manually, this will not work either.

Insert Caption simply inserts a Seq field in your text above or below a figure. If you select the same figure and use Insert Caption twice, you will get two captions. If you do it again, you will have three captions. The second and third screenshots demonstrate this and what you actually get.

[Charles Kenyon]

More on Captions in the chapter or Complex Documents.