microsoft word find and replace wildcard

The next and longest chapter is called “Wildcards in the Real World” and is full of examples of how to put wildcards to work in your documents. He shows how these can be surprisingly powerful when coupled with a few pattern matching operators like, >, <, and A useful table provides a list of ANSI codes that can be used in replacements instead of Word’s character code equivalents, many of which don’t work when using wildcards.

The meat of the book comes in the next chapter, which explains searching and replacing with wildcards, starting with the well-known ? and * characters. He includes a small macro that will show you the character code if you are confronted with a character that you don’t recognize. This will be useful to anyone working on a Macintosh or who has to deal with Unicode characters. The next chapter goes into detail about searching and replacing with character codes.

For example, you can search for section breaks but not replace something else (a page break) with a section break. Especially useful in this section is the table showing which codes work in the search field but not in the replace field. The book begins with an overview of the basic options of the Find and Replace dialog, then moves on to explaining how to use Word’s built-in codes, which let you search for special characters and formatting elements like section and page breaks. Jack Lyon, author of the excellent Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, has taken some of the content from that book and combined it with new material into a new book, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, with the goal of showing users how to fully exploit the power of Word’s search and replace feature. In my experience, most users never get past the stage of using the ? and * characters as wildcards in their searches. Its power, including regular expressions (which Word calls wildcards), hides behind a confusingly named check box one level deep in the Find and Replace dialog. It’s likely that most of Word’s users don’t use its search and replace feature to its full potential.

Microsoft word find and replace wildcard