I’m a big fan of using cross-references in Word documents. While they are time consuming to insert and manage, I generally feel the benefit to the user far outweighs the time (and, often, frustration) I spend inserting and updating. With that said, my biggest complaint was the Word has yet to add a feature that allows you to update all the references in your document at once.
Why would you want to do that, you ask? My simple answer – because I don’t author documents in a linear fashion. I tend to write in chunks. Sometimes it comes out in the correct order. Other times, I’ll work on chapter 3 then 10, then 1, etc. Throughout each section, I generally have a variety of references including table captions, figure captions and cross references. So if I’m adding figure captions, each time I add one to an earlier section, I have to go back and manually update each of the following ones. Word doesn’t do it for me automatically.
A few weeks ago I was searching around online and came across, this fantastic and simple solution! (Who knows why I didn’t ever think of this before. It’s so simple!)
- When you’re ready to update your captions and references in Word, click Edit then choose Select All to select all the text in your document. (Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-A to do the same thing.)
- Right-click on the highlighted text and choose Update All.
- If you have a Table of Contents (TOC) in your document, a pop up window appears asking if you want to update just the page numbers or the entire TOC. Select the appropriate choice then click OK.
Ta-Da! All the captions, cross references and TOCs are updated!
Note: This feature ONLY works for documents created in Word 2007. If you’re working in Word 2003 with a doc that was created in 2007, this should still work. If the doc was created in 2003, you’re stuck with updating each caption and cross reference manually.