title: How to find/replace a symbol with a check box control in Word
body: <p>I have mail merge field in my Word 2010 document that contains a check box control that is checked or not depending on the content from the input list.</p>
  
  <p>{IF NEW = "NEW" "☒" "☐"} where those boxes are actually check box controls</p>
  
  <p>However, after the mail merge is complete, the check box control is replaced with a symbol for the checked or unchecked box, as appropriate. As a result, one can no longer switch from checked to unchecked in the final document as you would for a check box control.</p>
  
  <p>A similar question was <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9502792/state-of-checkbox-can-no-more-be-checked-after-mail-merge">asked here</a> but was unresolved (one response with a solution does not work for me).</p>
  
  <p>I am looking for a simple way to find the checked or unchecked symbol in the output document and replace it with a check box document control in the appropriate state.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not big on programming, but if you could point me in the right direction, I'll try my best. I have played around with VB Macros in the past (very amateur), so I tried that again and got this far as a "proof of concept":</p>
  
  <pre><code>Sub Checkbox()
  ' ChrW(9744) is unchecked box; 9746 is checked box
      Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
      Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
      Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
      With Selection.Find
          .Text = ChrW(9744)
          .Replacement.Text = ChrW(9746)
          .Forward = True
          .Wrap = wdFindContinue
          .Format = False
          .MatchCase = False
          .MatchWholeWord = False
          .MatchWildcards = False
          .MatchSoundsLike = False
          .MatchAllWordForms = False
      End With
      Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
      Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
  End Sub
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also found out the way to add a checkbox control:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Selection.Range.ContentControls.Add (wdContentControlCheckBox)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I haven't figured out how to marry that last piece of code into the 'replace' line, nor how to define the checkbox as checked or not, based on the search.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for the help.</p>