Find all instances of yellow text and change font color to red

Question

I need a vba macro that searches for all text that has font color as yellow within a MS Word 2007 document and changes it to red. The yellow color won't show in the printouts. Manually selecting and changing will take me hours.

Answer 1

Following on from stakx's Word 97 solution, here's what works in Word 2010:

1. Open the Find and Replace dialogue (eg Ctrl-H)
2. Click in the "Find what" box.
3. Format drop-down, Font, choose the Font color to be found, OK.
4. Click in the "Replace with" box.
5. Format drop-down, Font, choose the colour to end up with, OK.
6. Observe that the Format: description for "Find what" and "Replace with" is now different.
7. Replace/Replace All/Find Next as desired.

You can determine the original colour as follows:

1. Click on a bit of text with the original colour
2. Open the colour palette. If neither a "Theme color" nor a "Standard color" is selected, you may need to click on "More colors".

Answer 2

There's actually a non-programming solution for this. I've tried it in Word 97, so I'd assume Word 2007 would still allows this:

1. Open the Search & Replace dialog.
2. Tick the checkbox that says, Pattern search (or similar).
3. As search term, enter (?) .
4. Select a formatting for the search (yellow text color).
5. As replacement term, enter \\1 .
6. Select the formatting for the replacement (red text color).
7. Then search and replace everything.

Steps 2, 3 and 5 (entering search and replace regular expressions) may not actually be necessary.

If you definitely need VBA code, you should be able to record the above steps as a macro and then look at the generated code.

Answer 3

Sub ChangeColorWithReplace()   
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Font.Color = wdColorYellow
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.Font.Color = wdColorRed
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = ""
        .Replacement.Text = ""
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = True
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchKashida = False
        .MatchDiacritics = False
        .MatchAlefHamza = False
        .MatchControl = False
        .MatchByte = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

Also, here's another way to do it. It's not extremely fast, but it's faster than doing it manually:

Sub ChangeFontColorByCharacter()
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    Dim d As Document: Set d = ActiveDocument
    For i = 1 To d.Characters.Count
        If d.Characters(i).Font.TextColor.RGB = RGB(255, 255, 0) Then
            d.Characters(i).Font.TextColor.RGB = RGB(255, 0, 0)
            DoEvents
        End If
    Next
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub