Remove comma from cell content (2003)

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Dear All,

Is there a way to search and remove “,” (comma) that appears as last character of content in a table cell?

Thank you in advance
Ridz

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If the comma is in a certain column in a table, you can select only that column and run a find/replace command finding a comma and replacing with nothing. (Leave replace blank). The replace will only take place in the selected column. At the end, choose NO when responding to “Do you want to continue with rest of doc” prompt.

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Thanks Rudi,

Unfortunately the case is not that simple. There are large amount of tables in different pages across 300+ pages. And to make things worse, that last comma is not the only comma in the table cell.

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I have been testing the find string:
>(*^44) or >(^44) or >, or >(,)…
but cannot seem to get anyto work… It still finds ALLcommas in the string.
I guess I am getting the codes wrong.

The find replace feaure is really powerful to replace many things, but this one has got me

Maybe a Word Guru can conjure up a macro to do the job.

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Try this macro:

Sub RemoveCommaFromEnd()
Dim oTable As Table
Dim oCell As Cell
Dim oRange As Range
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
For Each oTable In ActiveDocument.Tables
oTable.Select
For Each oCell In Selection.Cells
If Asc(Right(oCell.Range.Text, 3)) = 44 Then
Set oRange = oCell.Range
oRange.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
oRange.Characters.Last.Delete
End If
Next oCell
Next oTable
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

Note: the code will not remove a comma if there is an empty paragraph after it (a mistake people often make in table cells); it could be expanded to take care of that too.

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Hans,

In your and otherw experienced in Word… Is there no way to do this with find/replace. I know I struggled as you can see in the previous post, but the > search character allows to search at the end of the word…so can this be tweeked in any way to do the job without that rather impressive macro you wrote?

Cheers

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I don’t know what “your and otherw experienced in Word” is, but:
– You don’t know in advance which word is the last word in a cell, so I don’t see how you could use >.
– There is no code you can use in the Find/Replace dialog to find the end-of-cell marker.

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Sorry… I meant “In your or others opinion who are experienced in Word”…

I hear what you say, but the > search character is used like a input mask character to find a character at the end of the word. Hence me trying (,)>
This is what Word help has to say:

To find  	  	 	  	 Type  	  	 	  	 Example 
Any single character  	  	  	 ?  	  	  	 s?t  finds sat and set.  
Any string of characters  	  	  	 *  	  	  	 s*d finds sad and started. 
The beginning of a word  	  	  	 <  	  	  	   	  	  	 (in)>  finds in and within, but not interesting. 

It works in the example, but not for a comma. My only assumption is that it only works for alpha chars and numbers. ? That is why I tried the ascii codes (^44).

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A “word” is a series of characters delimited by interpunction such as a space, comma, period, colon, semicolon, question mark, exclamation mark, paragraph end and no doubt others. Hence, a comma is not part of a word.

But once again, even if you could find a comma at the end of a word, how would that help? There could also be a comma at the end of a word in the middle of a cell, and you wouldn’t want to remove that. So there is no point in trying to use > here.

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Can we assume that all commas (other than the last comma in a cell) are followed by a space?
In which case we do a 3 stage change
Find ‘, ‘ (Comma Space) and replace with ‘!#’ (or some similar unique combination)
Find ‘,’ (Comma) and replace with ” (empty string)
Find ”!#’ and replace with ‘, ‘ (Comma Space)

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Ok…this is more clearer. I have it now.
TX Hans and Gfamily.

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That is a clever thought, but the assumption could be dangerous – what if there are numbers such as 12,345.67?
Also, the original poster mentioned that this is a long document with many tables. A Replace All would work throughout the document (not only in tables). Selecting each table in turn, then replacing within the selection only becomes tedious after a while.
The macro I posted will loop through all tables in the document, it doesn’t affect other parts of the document.

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