Locating Locked Fields

Fields are very useful when working with a document—they allow you to place "dynamic" information in your documents. Sometimes you may want a field to remain static; to not change. You can do this by selecting the field and press Ctrl+F11. This "locks" the field so it does not update from its current value.

If you have a lot of fields in a document, and some of them are locked, you may want a way to quickly find out which ones are locked. Word has no special feature that allows you to search for locked fields, but you can create a macro that will search them out for you. The following macro, FindLocked, starts at the beginning of a document and finds locked fields. It selects each locked field, in turn, and asks you if you want to continue searching.

Sub FindLocked()
    Dim iField As Integer
    Dim vResponse As Variant

    For iField = 1 To ActiveDocument.Fields.Count
        If ActiveDocument.Fields(iField).Locked Then
            ActiveDocument.Fields(iField).Select
            vResponse = MsgBox("Continue Searching?", vbYesNo)
            If vResponse = vbNo Then Exit For
        End If
    Next iField
End Sub