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Remove content controls in Word

Anonymous
2019-09-20T19:00:21+00:00

Old Word documents with fillable form fields can be "flattened" using Ctrl-Shift-F9 to convert all fields to plain text. How is this accomplished in Word 2016, without having to manually right-click each individual form field and remove the content control?

It seems fairly ridiculous that there is not a one-click solution. I have seen VBA code that claims to do it, but I should not have to build a macro for a feature that used to be built in. Even a button in the Developer tab would be acceptable.

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  1. Jay Freedman 207.5K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-21T01:10:23+00:00

    Doug is correct. One more point: you can then save the result as a .docx file again, and the content controls will not come back.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-09-23T17:38:09+00:00

    Thanks, all. Saving as a .doc works but it does seem ridiculous that Microsoft went from a key combo to such a ridiculous workaround to get the same functionality. The .doc format was deprecated more than 12 years ago, in Word 2007 - the same version of Office that introduced the more modern content controls. One would think that in the intervening time an Office programmer might have considered a more elegant solution.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-04-15T00:50:27+00:00
    1. Ctrl + A
    2. Right-click on one of the content controls
    3. Remove content control
    4. Done

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-09-23T09:44:12+00:00

    Hi dr.nixon,

    Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community. From your description, you would like to remove content controls in Word. Doug and Jay Freedman’s suggestions are right, and I will offer another solution:

    (1)Right-click the text in the content control you should see an option that lets you remove the content control.

    (2)If the option is not in the right-click menu, it means the content control has been locked. In this case, you need to go to File>Options>Customize ribbon>Main tabs>Developer>click Properties in the Group for controls, and deactivate the checkbox(es) that lock the content controls.

    If the issue persists, we would like to collect information below for further investigation:

    1.Please provide us the screenshot of all these steps been done that we can know more clearly how the issue looks like.

    2.The screenshot of the version of your Word. ( Go to File> Account> About Word).

    Regards，

    Amiu

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