Underlining Section References Automatically

Agnes asked if there is a way to automatically underline all instances of the word "Section" and any ancillary information following the word. For example, a document might contain text such as "Section 2.3(b)(i)" or "Section 5.21" or "Section 12.12(a)" and Agnes wants to find this text and have it all be underlined.

There are a couple of things to try. First of all, you could do a standard Find and Replace, but only if you can somehow make the text a little more "standard." Without some sort of a pattern that can be matched, it is virtually impossible to do a Find and Replace that will find all possible instances of the text.

A possibility, however, is to record a macro that does look at all the possibilities. It wouldn't necessarily be a simple macro, as it would need to find the word "Section" followed immediately by a space, a digit, a period, more digits, and then (optionally) everything up to and including a closing parenthesis. That is quite a bit of text analysis that needs to occur.

The place to start is with a wildcard search. The following search phrase will find the word Section followed by a "number dot number" pattern:

Section [0-9]{1,}.[0-9]{1,}

If this search pattern is used in a macro, then the macro can, after each successful find of the text, start expanding what was found and see if it contains parenthetical characters. The following macro will perform this task.

Sub ULWords()
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = "Section [0-9]{1,}.[0-9]{1,}"
        .Replacement.Text = ""
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = True
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute
    While Selection.Find.Found
        Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, _
          Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
            While Right(Selection.Text, 1) = "("
                Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, _
                  Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
                While Right(Selection.Text, 1) <> ")"
                    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, _
                      Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
                Wend
                Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, _
                  Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
            Wend
        Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, _
          Count:=-1, Extend:=wdExtend
        Selection.Font.Underline = True
        Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
        Selection.Find.Execute
    Wend
End Sub

Note that the macro uses a wildcards search at the beginning to find all instances of the word "Section" followed by the "number dot number" pattern. If an instance is found, then it is extended by one character. If that character is an opening parenthesis then the selection is extended until a closing parenthesis is found. This process of finding opening/closing parentheses is continued, and when no more sets are located the entire extended selection is underlined. This process continues until the entire document has been searched.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11516) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Underlining Section References Automatically.