Find/Replace an Inserted Check Box Symbol with a Check Box Content Control

Question

I would like to find/replace all inserted check box symbols with checkbox content controls. The symbol's font is Wingdings (either 111 or 168). Below is the code I started with, but I hit a wall when I realized that Word find doesn't recognize the symbol. I appreciate any help or guidance. Thank you.

Sub ReplaceUnicode168()
    Dim objContentControl As ContentControl
    With ActiveDocument
      Set objContentControl = ActiveDocument.ContentControls.Add(wdContentControlCheckBox)
        objContentControl.Cut
        With Selection.Find
          .ClearFormatting
          .Replacement.ClearFormatting
          .Forward = True
          .Wrap = wdFindContinue
          .MatchCase = False
          .MatchWholeWord = True
          .MatchWildcards = False
          .Text = Chr(168)
          .Replacement.Text = "^c"
          .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
        End With
    End With
End Sub

Answer 1

I suggest that you try to find/replace these two particular characters using

.Text = ChrW(61551)

for the "111" WingDings Character and

.Text = ChrW(61608)

for the "168" WingDings character.

Be aware that the way Word encodes these characters is not very helpful. As far as Find/Replace is concerned, you have to use these Unicode Private Use Area encodings.

If you actually select the character and use VBA to discover its code using e.g.

Debug.Print AscW(Selection)

the answer is always 40 (and the Font of the character will probably be the same as the Surrounding font) Pretty useless. In older versions of Word you used to be able to look for the 40 character and find these characters, but I don't think that's possible now. But if you select the character and use

Sub SymInfo()
With Dialogs(wdDialogInsertSymbol)
  ' You won't see .Font and .CharNum listed under the
  ' properties of a Word.Dialog - some older Dialogs add
  ' per-Dialog properties at runtime.
  Debug.Print .Font
  Debug.Print .CharNum
End With
End Sub

Then you get the font name (Wingdings in this case) and the private use area character number, except it's expressed as a negative number (-3928 for Wingdings 168). The character to use in the Find/Replace is 65536-3928 = 61608.

Alternatively, you can find the private use area code by selecting the character, getting its WordOpenXML code, then finding the XML element that gives the code (and the font). Ideally use MSXML to look for the element but the following gives the general idea.

Sub getSymElement
Dim finish As Long
Dim start As Long
Dim x As String
x = Selection.WordOpenXML
start = Instr(1,x,"<w:sym")
' Should check for start = 0 (not found) here.
finish = Instr(start,x,">")
Debug.Print Mid(x,start, finish + 1 - start)

and for the 168 character you should see something like

<w:sym w:font="Wingdings" w:char="F0A8"/>

(Hex F0A8 is 61608)

There may be a problem where Word could potentially map more than one font/code to the same unicode private use area codepoint. There is some further code by Dave Rado here but I do not think you will need it for this particular problem.

After some follow-up, the following seems to work reasonably well here:

Sub replaceWingdingsWithCCs()
Dim cc As Word.ContentControl
Dim charcode As Variant
Dim ccchecked As Variant
Dim i As Integer
Dim r As Word.Range

' Make sure the selection point is not in the way
' (If the selection contains one of the characters you are trying to
' replace, Word will raise an error about the selection being in a
' plain text content control.

' If the first item in the document is not a CC,
' it's enouugh to do this:

ActiveDocument.Select
Selection.Collapse WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseStart

' Put the character codes you need to look for here. Maybe you have some checked boxes too?
charcode = Array(61551, 61608)
' FOr each code, say whether you want a checked box (True) or an unchecked one.
ccchecked = Array(False, False)

For i = LBound(charcode) To UBound(charcode)
  Set r = ActiveDocument.Range
  With r.Find
    .ClearFormatting
    With .Replacement
      .ClearFormatting
      .Text = ""
    End With
    .Forward = True
    .Wrap = wdFindStop
    .MatchCase = False
    .MatchWholeWord = True
    .MatchWildcards = False
    .Text = ChrW(charcode(i))
    Do While .Execute(Replace:=True)
      Set cc = r.ContentControls.Add(WdContentControlType.wdContentControlCheckBox)
      cc.Checked = ccchecked(i)
      r.End = r.Document.Range.End
      r.Start = cc.Range.End + 1
      Set cc = Nothing
    Loop
  End With
Next
Set r = Nothing
End Sub