Substitute Times font with Times New Roman in MS Word?

Apple's fonts are stored in the read-only System volume that you will not be able to change. Microsoft Word stores its fonts in the application bundle, again where you cannot change them.

If you are still using MS Word (or even LibreOffice Writer), the Find/Replace utility will allow you to mass change document occurrences of the Times fonts to Times New Roman. This may not be without some post formatting effort.

Apple's Pages does not have a robust Find/Replace tool that can perform the previous paragraph font changes.

I went back to macOS Mojave and created a Word document containing the Times font reference. I then transferred that document back to macOS Tahoe, where with that document open in MS Word, the following AppleScript replaced all Times font references with Times New Roman. Quicker than Find/Replace.

tell application "Microsoft Word"
	set myFind to find object of text object of active document
	clear formatting myFind
	set name of font object of myFind to "Times"
	set content of myFind to ""
	clear formatting replacement of myFind
	set name of font object of replacement of myFind to "Times New Roman"
	set content of replacement of myFind to ""
	execute find myFind replace replace all
end tell

Tested: Microsoft Word v16.111.1, macOS Tahoe 26.5.2.

Copy/paste the script code from above into Apple's Script Editor, press that application's hammer icon to compile it. Open an example Word document with a Times font in Word, then click the run toolbar item in the Script Editor.

It works on the currently opened Word document. It may not work on Word .doc files. The example script does not save the Word document after the font replacement activity and you would need to save and close the Word document manually with this current code.

I rarely write scripts for Microsoft Word and the above is code that I found online and tested, before posting. Yes, one could enhance the code to get all Word documents from a folder, apply the code above to each, save, and close them — but it would be obnoxious (and time consuming) to watch Word open and close each document, especially if the document numbers were in the hundreds…

This would also be time consuming for me to create the test documents with a Times font on macOS Mojave and then get them back onto my primary Mac running Tahoe where I would test the script code.

A revision to close and save the font changes in the active document:

tell application "Microsoft Word"
	set myFind to find object of text object of active document
	clear formatting myFind
	set name of font object of myFind to "Times"
	set content of myFind to ""
	clear formatting replacement of myFind
	set name of font object of replacement of myFind to "Times New Roman"
	set content of replacement of myFind to ""
	execute find myFind replace replace all
    delay 1
    close active document saving yes
end tell