How to swap two words in a Microsoft Word document?

21

1

I have a very long file which refers certain persons as Petitioners and certain persons as Respondents. I want to swap these two words so that the Petitioner is changed to Respondent, and vice versa. Can this be done automatically?

Usman

Posted 2018-01-06T07:10:14.260

Reputation: 331

Answers

48

Use a third word that does not occur in your text. e.g.

  • change (find and replace) all 'Petitioner' to 'PetitionerXX',
  • then change all 'Respondent' to 'Petitioner',
  • and finally change all 'PetitionerXX' to 'Respondent'.

muclux

Posted 2018-01-06T07:10:14.260

Reputation: 680

12I would use something even more unique than appending a couple of XX, eg. "[QWERTYIUIO]". And always review the changes performed. Sometimes unexpected words arise. If you were changing "petition" to "response", you wouldn't want the petitioner to become the responseer. Whereas you probably do want petitioners to become repondents. – Ángel – 2018-01-06T23:00:10.740

2Also put the unique appending text at the beginning and end of the word to avoid the above stated issue. – Xonatron – 2018-01-07T01:40:44.487

1@Ángel if one feels really paranoid, it's a good idea to generate a one-time-use UUID as something truly unique :) – Ruslan – 2018-01-07T16:58:42.780

and use the "match whole word" and "case sensitive" options carefully. Furthermore, there may be multiple grammatical cases that need to be considered: Petitioners, petitioner's, petitioners', petitioner, hyphenated compounds like "petitioner-caused" etc. Some versions of Word have a tick box for this in the replace dialog, I've no idea how sophisticated that is. – dlatikay – 2018-01-07T20:00:13.197

Asked: 2018-01-06T07:10:14.260

Viewed: 3 303 times

Active: 2018-01-06T07:30:03.620