Finding Footnotes without Final Punctuation Marks

Randy has a document that has quite a few footnotes. He needs to locate all the footnotes that don't end with a period, question mark, exclamation mark, or quote mark. He knows how to use Find and Replace within footnotes, but he doesn't know if Find and Replace can be used for this need.

For this type of task, Find and Replace is not the best choice. It is better to use a macro to examine each footnote and highlight those that don't fit what Randy expects. Here is an example of such a macro:

Sub FlagFootnotes()
    Dim fn As Footnote
    Dim s As String
    Dim lastChar As String

    For Each fn In ActiveDocument.Footnotes
        s = fn.Range.Text

        ' Remove footnote end marker
        s = Left(s, Len(s) - 1)

        ' Strip trailing spaces, tabs, NBSPs, paragraph marks
        Do While Len(s) > 0
            Select Case AscW(Right(s, 1))
                Case 32, _      ' space
                     9, _       ' tab
                     160, _     ' nonbreaking space
                     13, _      ' paragraph mark
                     11         ' manual line break
                    s = Left(s, Len(s) - 1)
                Case Else
                    Exit Do
            End Select
        Loop

        If Len(s) > 0 Then
            lastChar = Right(s, 1)
            Select Case lastChar
                Case ".", "?", "!", """", ChrW(8221)
                    ' OK
                Case Else
                    fn.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
            End Select
        End If
    Next fn
End Sub

The macro steps through each footnote and assigns the text of the footnote to the s variable. It then does two things with that text. First, it strips any trailing whitespace, and then it checks to see what the last character is. If it is anything other than what Randy wanted, then the text of the footnote is highlighted in yellow.

Once the macro has been run, Randy simply needs to look through the document for any highlighted footnotes. Those are the ones that need some attention relative to the final character.

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