"Change Text" default of "All Fields" can be disastrous!

I posted a note regarding lost file links for attached documents and someone suggested I post it here in suggestions. I lost all my file links due to the default in “Change Text” as follows:

My problem was associated with some text changes I did when I accidently didn’t choose the field to change. That left the default of “Any Field”, so when I changed all “/” to “;” to tidy up my keywords it also changed the "/"s in the File Attachment fields which broke all the links. It was then fairly straightforward to go back and change the ";"s back to "/"s and get the links working again.

The lesson which I need to learn is to be very careful about using “Change Text” as the default is “Any Field” which can  be deadly as there is no warning.

Thomson: my suggestion is, could you put a warning message in the Change Text box when someone tries to do a change without selecting a specific field? Or better: force a selection of a specific field and also give an option of “Any Field” but only by deliberate selection not default? The default could simply be “Choose Field”

I’m sure lots of people have made global changes using Change Text when they have only meant to change a particular field. 

Thanks!

Me too! Force this dialog to require choosing a field.  All fields (or Authors as it used to be) can be a real oops! even though it does prompt with the number of matches, it doesn’t report what field the replacements are being found in.