Share via

Can't search by font to find inserted Wingding symbols

Anonymous
2019-05-10T19:47:19+00:00

I work with MS Word 2016 documents that are hundreds of pages long and contain a small number of inserted symbols. The symbols are in other fonts, like Wingdings and Webdings.

Unfortunately, these funny fonts are breaking my project when I export the document to MadCap Flare, so I need to remove them. But Advanced Find does not work. When I try to search for Wingdings, Word doesn't find a symbol that I just put there. In fact, if I select the symbol and look at the font box, it just says Calibri.

Not only is the symbol itself unfindable, but when I did find and remove the symbol, the spaces around it remained in the Wingdings font and broke my project!

I kinda get how the developers might have wanted to prevent craziness if someone inserted a symbol and then unwittingly put the cursor too close (or selected the symbol to replace it with text) and was suddenly spitting out Wingdings. But how do I find symbols when I don't even know which ones I might be looking for?

Thanks!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

4 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Suzanne S Barnhill 278.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-05-13T20:38:26+00:00

    A .docx is an XML archive. You can extract its components the same way you open a .zip archive. Just change the file extension to .zip, double-click to open it, open the document.xml component and make the change Doug suggested. That part is fairly straightforward, but the next part is not.

    I'm not sure how you re-archive the file; I asked Cortana how to create a .zip archive and got a lot of Web results; maybe Doug can help us there. But once you've achieved that, you change the file extension back from .zip to .docx and you're done.

    Here's an article that tells how to extract the document.xml and then put it back; that's probably what Doug is talking about: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/howto/explore-the-contents-of-a-docx-file-in-windows-7/ (it's written for Windows 7, but the same thing will work in Windows 10).

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-05-10T23:40:23+00:00

    If you extract the components of the document from the archive (that's all a Word file is) and then open the document.xml component in an xml editor and search for Wingdings and then select and delete the block of text that includes it as shown below

    and then re-archive the files and change the extension back to .docx, the symbols will no longer appear.

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-13T14:24:18+00:00

    If you extract the components of the document from the archive 

    Extract? Components? Archive?

    Perhaps there's an article you can point to to help with this? The topic is hard to search for on this site, as it brings up a huge number of unrelated pages.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2019-05-13T20:43:13+00:00

    Thanks—I think I get it. Most appreciated!

    For my purposes, finding the errant fonts will be enough. I can go back to the document and remove the surrounding text to be safe.

    But for others, if someone wants to explain how to re-archive the XML, have at it!

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments