... in the world of Technical Communication

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!)

1. 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.)
2. Right-click on the highlighted text and choose Update All.
3. 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.