Word 2010 -- Removing page cites within a document

[FearlessStamper]

An attorney I work for will often dictate a memo on medical records, citing the page numbers within the paragraphs, i.e., (p. 27) (pp. 27-29) (p. 27, 29)

Often, she later copies that text into a letter to our client, but she needs to remove the page cites.

I am moderately macro-intelligent, however, i am not sure how to create a macro that could search for the different variations of page cites.

Is there a way to create a macro that could search for all variations of page cites and remove them?



For instance, my fear is if i create a macro that searches for "(p" it might pick up a part of a word/sentence that is supposed to be set out in parenthesis.

any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Andrea

[Charles Kenyon]

If you could mark the text with a character style it would be easy to find.

[macropod]

You could use a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ^32\(p[!\)]@\)
Replace = nothing
No macros required.

[Charles Kenyon]

Originally Posted by macropod

You could use a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ^32\(p[!\)]@\)
Replace = nothing
No macros required.

Paul, your understanding of wildcards far exceeds mine. However, the above replaces (p. 2) and (paragraph 24) but not (pp. 3-7). Is a period needed?

Find = ^32\(p.[!\)]@\)
Replace = nothing

followed by

Find = ^32\(pp.[!\)]@\)
Replace = nothing

Andrea:

For more on wildcards.
Here is a white paper on the subject.
The searches are looking for a space before the first open parenthesis. If your attorney is at all like me and there are any where there is not a space first, they will not be replaced. To take care of that, you could take the ^32 out of the search strings in a cleanup.

Also, remember that wildcard searches are case-sensitive so these will not find (P. 23).

[macropod]

Originally Posted by Charles Kenyon

Paul, your understanding of wildcards far exceeds mine. However, the above replaces (p. 2) and (paragraph 24) but not (pp. 3-7).

Au contraire, it replaces all of those.

[Charles Kenyon]

Originally Posted by macropod

Au contraire, it replaces all of those.

Just tried again and it replaced all three. I must have not had a space in front of the one that didn't last time.

However, she did not want it to replace (paragraph 24). I'm sure you can put together a construction that will do either p. or pp. in one pass; I may try later tonight.

[macropod]

Originally Posted by Charles Kenyon

However, she did not want it to replace (paragraph 24).

I don't see any indication of that in post #1, or even that such references exist.