Question: Is there any way to get Word to find and replace a varied range of numbers by 1?
I am using Word 2010 on Windows 7.
I have a large document that contains about 300 cites to documents that will be submitted with the document. Each cite reads as "Exh. X" (where X is a number, 1 through 300). So the text might read as follows:
The car is brown. (Exh. 1). The house is red. (Exh. 2). The house is small. (Exh. 3). The car was painted Brown by Jack. (Exh. 1). The car is broken. (Exh. 4).
The exhibits sometimes change. So Exh. 2 might drop out entirely, leaving a gap from Exh. 1 to Exh. 3. I then need to go through and reduce every exhibit number greater than 2 by one. So Exh. 3 becomes Exh. 2, Exh. 4 becomes Exh. 3, etc. When done manually, this is very time consuming.
If each exhibit only appeared once, I could easily make this change using a field, finding and replacing all the Exh. X entries with the field, and then updating it. But I only know how to do this sequentially (i.e., once updated, the exhibits will run 1 through however many Exh. entries there are). However, as the example above shows, some exhibits appear later in the document and must be referenced by the earlier exhibit number. So Exh. 1 appears first, but it then reappears after Exh. 3. If I were to update this text using a sequential list after Exh. 2 dropped out, then "The car was painted Brown by Jack (Exh. 1)" would instead be marked with Exh. 3.
Is there anyway to get Word to automatically reduce every Exh. number greater than 2 by 1 (or any value)?
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
