Find and replace highlighted text in Word document

Thanks Aaron. That’s a great solution. However, when a document is edited as .XML, saved and opened again, Word detects this and displays a message saying the file was tampered with. This is worrying if you’re sharing the document with another party.

Could you perhaps suggest a way to save all the highlighted text as variables to then use your first suggestion of find and replace?

Perhaps you would need to collate all highlighted text snippets into a list variable? But then I would need to figure out a way of combining text where it is cut off mid-word. Perhaps something to do with <w:r> and similar tags, but it is a 10/10 difficulty as you say.

I noticed these structures when dealing with highlighted text:

<w:r w:rsidRPr="00E00CDB">
    <w:rPr>
        <w:highlight w:val="yellow"/>
    </w:rPr>
    <w:t>Yellow highlighted</w:t>
</w:r>

I do see that the val=”yellow” changes as the color of the highlight changes. The <w:t> tags seem to surround the bits of text while <w:r> seems to surround the formatting changes.

In theory, looping through the <w:r> tags, looking for a <w:highlight> tag within should point you toward the highlighted text. As long as your find/replace has the “highlight” option enabled in Format, you may be able to perform those find/replace actions with less (but not zero) risk of replacing the incorrect text.

You should be able to add the text (e.g., “Yellow highlighted” above) to a List variable and then open the original Word document, set up the Find/Replace with Format > Highlight, make your replacements, and be able to save the file without weird messages.