I have a template I use for creating letters and it has various form fields
(mostly pull-down menus) that I use to create those letters. I have all of
those letters saved in various folders, and I would like to be able to do a
search in Windows to find all of the letters that have a specific month,
like "April", in the letter. Usually, this form field is the only place
that the name of the month would occur in the letter, so I'm not concerned
about grabbing letters that have the word "April" somewhere else in the body
of the letter.

The problem I have is that Windows does not seem to include the contents of
a form field when doing searches. Whether I'm searching from within the
Word documents themselves, or using Start---Search, Windows just doesn't
seem to pay attention to those fields. Is there a way to make Windows "see"
the text in those fields so I can search on it?

-Brian

I'm afraid you've pretty well shot yourself in the foot by using form
fields this way. As far as a Windows search is concerned, the only
thing in that spot in each document is a field code -- it's the Word
program that interprets the code and shows a word like "April".

There's one possibility: Use a Word macro that opens each document and
tests the value of that specific dropdown, storing the names of the
matching documents in a list or leaving the document open. This
depends on all the documents being based on the same template, so that
the form field has the same name in each document. It's also going to
be very slow because of the opening and closing of lots of documents,
including those that don't match.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006 10:20:13 -0500, "Brian Beck"
wrote:

I have a template I use for creating letters and it has various form fields
(mostly pull-down menus) that I use to create those letters. I have all of
those letters saved in various folders, and I would like to be able to do a
search in Windows to find all of the letters that have a specific month,
like "April", in the letter. Usually, this form field is the only place
that the name of the month would occur in the letter, so I'm not concerned
about grabbing letters that have the word "April" somewhere else in the body
of the letter.

The problem I have is that Windows does not seem to include the contents of
a form field when doing searches. Whether I'm searching from within the
Word documents themselves, or using Start---Search, Windows just doesn't
seem to pay attention to those fields. Is there a way to make Windows "see"
the text in those fields so I can search on it?

-Brian