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There are two types of people: Those that find file formats exciting, and those that haven't read Chris Rae's blog yet.

Using VBA to turn numbering into normal text in Word documents

As you probably know by now, I spend a lot of my time writing up proposed edits to the file format standard IS 29500 in Word. The end result of what I'm doing always ends up being sent to my ISO colleagues on WG4 in another document. I'll be editing something that looks like this:

When I copy and paste this into a new document to send to my colleagues, it unfortunately looks like this:

This is because Word faithfully maintained my numbering settings, and the proceeding numbered sections are all gone. You may come across similar headaches when you want to edit a large document where the section numbering must remain constant, and you don't want to mess with it by mistake.

Well, I wrote some code to turn the numbered sections in my document into normal paragraph text. It works on numbered lists as well as numbered sections.

As you'll know if you run this code on a large document, it's as slow as the proverbial anyway. For thousands of pages, you may wish to prepare a cup of tea.

The code is below - as ever, if you have any fixes or changes, I'd love to hear them. Please bear in mind that I wrote this for my own purposes and it's not really been tested at all - I noticed today, for example, that it seems to remove indentation on paragraphs which doesn't matter to me but might matter to you. Please don't run this on your documents without keeping a copy of them first!

Private Sub RemoveNumberingOnAllSections()

Dim i As Paragraph, lastsaved As Date

' Convert all important sections to straight text (no numbering)

For Each i In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs

If IsNumberedPara(i.Range) Then

For Each i In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs

If IsNumberedPara(i.Range) Then

Private Sub ConvertNumberedToTextNoDelete(rOf As Range)

If InStr(rOf.ListFormat.ListString, ".") > 0 Then

If Left(rOf.Text, Len(rOf.ListFormat.ListString)) <> rOf.ListFormat.ListString Then

' Haven't done this one already

Private Function IsNumberedPara(rOf As Range) As Boolean

If rOf Is Nothing Then ' if the document doesn't have numbered sections, this will cause changes to be enumerated in the whole thing

ElseIf rOf.ListFormat.ListString <> "" Then

If Asc(rOf.ListFormat.ListString) <> 63 Then

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Here is a revision to your code that steps through the paragraphs backwards and converts the number to text.