Get all cross references in word with VBA

Question

I have quite a large word document (> 400 pages) with lots of cross references to headings. So far, I have always referred to the title of the heading, but now I would like to change that and refer to the page the heading resides on.

I didn't find a solution to this via the GUI (except manual treatment, of course), so I was looking into writing some VBA. Unfortunately, I have only found a way to list all targets that can be cross referenced (via GetCrossReferenceItems), but I need a way to access the actual cross reference field.

Can you help me with that? Is a cross reference field the same as a hyperlink?

Answer 1

Cross-references are fields in a Word document, and can be accessed via the Fields collection (ActiveDocument.Fields). You can loop through them like any other collection and check their types to see if it's one you want to work on. It looks like cross-references to text are type 3 (wdFieldRef) and cross-references to page numbers are type 37 (wdFieldPageRef). Changing fields can be a little tricky; the following should get you started:

Sub ChangeFields()
    Dim objDoc As Document
    Dim objFld As Field
    Dim sFldStr As String
    Dim i As Long, lFldStart As Long

    Set objDoc = ActiveDocument
    ' Loop through fields in the ActiveDocument
    For Each objFld In objDoc.Fields
        ' If the field is a cross-ref, do something to it.
        If objFld.Type = wdFieldRef Then
            'Make sure the code of the field is visible. You could also just toggle this manually before running the macro.
            objFld.ShowCodes = True
            'I hate using Selection here, but it's probably the most straightforward way to do this. Select the field, find its start, and then move the cursor over so that it sits right before the 'R' in REF.
            objFld.Select
            Selection.Collapse wdCollapseStart
            Selection.MoveStartUntil "R"
            'Type 'PAGE' to turn 'REF' into 'PAGEREF'. This turns a text reference into a page number reference.
            Selection.TypeText "PAGE"
            'Update the field so the change is reflected in the document.
            objFld.Update
            objFld.ShowCodes = True
        End If
    Next objFld   
End Sub