: With the cursor in the 'Find what:' or 'Replace with:' boxes you can use keyboard shortcuts to enhance

the strings with the princ

formatting options e.g CTRL+U - underline, CTRL+I - italics, etc. These operate as toggles to cycle through the various options
available.

Wildcard Description Notes

? and * The two most basic wildcards are ? and *. In the quoted examp
the asterisk returns
They are essentially similar in use. as a match.
? is used to represent a single character and * represents any number of characters. On their own, Word does not limit
these have limited use. number of character
that the asterisk can
s?t will find sat, set, sit, sot and any other combination of three characters beginning with 's' and match, and it does n
ending with 't'. It will also find that combination of letters with a word, thus it would locate the relevant require that characte
(highlighted) part of inset etc. or spaces reside
s*t will find all the above, but will also find 'secret', 'serpent', 'sailing boat' and 'sign over document', between the literal
etc. characters that you
with the asterisk.

The asterisk is a rat

blunt weapon which
must be used with c
as it can return a lot
unwanted results.

@ @ is used to find re-occurrences of the previous character (if any). e.g. lo@t will find lot or loot, ful@
will find ful or full etc.

<> With any of the above (or any other combination of wildcards and characters), you can use the brackets
< and > to mark the start and end of a word respectively. Thus in the example used above for '*'

<s*t> would find 'secret' and 'serpent', but not 'sailing boats' and 'sign over documents'. Though
again, given the use of '*', beware as it will find the block of text from a word starting with 's' to the end
of the next word in the document ending with 't', e.g. 'sailing boat' which may not be what you had in
mind.

The <> brackets can be used in pairs as above or individually as appropriate e.g. ful@> will find 'full'
and the appropriate part of 'wilful' but not 'wilfully'.

[] Square brackets are always used in pairs and are used to identify specific characters or ranges of
characters. e.g.:

[abc] will find any of the letters abc. [F] will find upper case 'F';

[A-Z] will find any upper case letter; [0-9] will find any single number; [13579] will find any odd
numbers; [0-9A-Za-z] will find any numbers or letters.

The characters can be any character or series of characters, including space. Characters are
processed in order - lowest first. If you are uncertain which character is lower than another check with
'Insert > Symbol'.

[!] [!] is very similar to [ ] except in this case it is used to exclude any character listed in the box so [!o]
would find every character except 'o'. You can use ranges of characters in exactly the same was as
 with [ ], thus [!A-Z] will find everything except upper case letters.

For advanced users only

You can paste any (Unicode) character - unfortunately *not* characters from decorative (Symbol) fonts) - into your search expression
So copying the first and last characters from the Greek or cyrillic subsets into a search:

[;-ώ] would match any Greek character α β γ δ ε ...

<[Ё-ґ]@> matches any cyrillic word: Вы можете помочь мне? (“Can you help me please?”)

In Word 2000, you can type in Unicode characters with the Alt-key (make sure NumLock is on, then hold down the Alt-key and type the
numbers on the numeric keyboard). Since all characters from decorative fonts (Symbol-, Wingdings-fonts ...) are kept in a special code pa
from &HF000 to &HF0FF, you can search for them with [Alt61472-Alt61695].

{} Curly brackets are used for counting occurrences of the previous character or expression. Counting can be use
with individual
{n} This finds exactly the number 'n' of occurrences of the previous character characters or more
{n,} Finds at least the number 'n' occurrences. usefully with sets of
{n,m} Finds the number of occurrences from 'n' to 'm'. characters e.g. [den
{4} will match done,
Note: The above examples employ a comma as a list separator {n,m} - for node, eden) or
languages that use alternative list separators, substitute the local separator bracketed groups: (t
character (often a semi-colon {n;m}) as appropriate. {3} will match ts, ts,

(Unfortunately, the
is no wildcard to
search for "zero or
more occurrences
Word wildcard
searches; [!^13]{0,
does not work).

() Round brackets have no effect on the search pattern, but are used to divide the pattern into logical The placeholders \1
sequences, where you wish to re-assemble those sequences in a different order during the replace - or etc., can also be use
to replace only part of that sequence. They must be used in pairs. the search string to
\ identify recurring tex
The partnering backslash character is used as a replacement string in conjunction with a number to e.g.
indicate which pair of brackets numbered from the left is required e.g.
Fred Fred could be
(John) (Smith) replaced by \2 \1 - note the spaces in the search and replace strings - will produce written (Fred) \1.
Smith John

or replaced by \2 alone will give Smith.

\ If you wish to search for a character that has a special meaning in wildcard searches - the obvious See also 'Gremlins t
example being '?'. then you can do so by putting a backslash in front of it: [\?] will find the question aware of (for advanc
mark character '?' users only)' at the e
this page
If you wish to find the backslash itself then you need to precede that with a backslash [\\].

The following is a list of the characters that have a special meaning in wildcard searches ( [ ] { } < > ( ) -
@?!*\)

Gotchas .
 You may wish to identify a character string by means of a paragraph mark ¶. The normal search string for this would be ^p.

^p DOES NOT WORK in wildcard search strings! It must however be used in replacement strings, but when searching, you must look
the substitute code ^13.

Wildcard searches will also not find footnote/endnote marks - substitute ^2.

A-z would be expected to reproduce all the letters between A and z i.e. both upper case and lower case letters, which it does, but it
reproduces all the characters from ASCII 65 to ASCII 122, and that block also includes the characters [ ] ` ^ _ / Use A-Za-z instead.

The question mark ? is used to find individual characters. If used with curly brackets to define a range of characters eg #?{1,3}# it will beh
as an asterisk and find all the characters between the hash symbols.

ntrol Codes that may be used with the search/replace tool

://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=197855
Code Notes
^1 In-Line Picture
^2 Auto-referenced footnotes
^5 Annotation mark
^9 Tab
^11 New line
^12 Page or section break
^13 Carriage return
^14 Column break
^19 Opening field brace (when the field braces are visible)
^21 Closing field brace (when the field braces are visible)
? Question mark
^? Any single character (not valid in the Replace box)
^- Optional hyphen
^~ Non breaking hyphen
^^ Caret character
^# Any digit
^$ Any letter
^& Contents of 'Find What' box (Replace box only)
^+ Em dash (not valid in the Replace box)
^= En dash (not valid in the Replace box)
^u8195 Em Space Unicode character value search (not valid in the Replace box)
^u8194 En Space Unicode character value search (not valid in the Replace box)
^a Comment (not valid in the replace box)
^b Section break (not valid in the replace box)
^c Replace with Clipboard contents (Replace box only)
^d Field
^e Endnote Mark (not valid in the Replace box)
^f Footnote Mark (not valid in the Replace box)
^g Graphic (In Line Graphics Only). In Word 2007 a forward slash / also appears to find in-line graphics. This appears to be a
unintentional bug.
^l New line -
^m Manual Page Break
^n Column break
^t Tab -
^p Paragraph Mark -
^s Non-breaking space
^w White space (space, non-breaking space, tab; not valid in the Replace box)
^nnn Where "n" is an ASCII character number.
Note: ASCII codes below 128 were standardized a long time ago, before the introduction of Windows operating
systems. The upper codes were used for OS-specific, localized, or vendor-specific stuff. When DOS code pages w
replaced by Windows code pages, a leading zero was used to indicated the difference.
Thus ^32 and ^032 will both represent a space character, but ^147 will represent ô and ^0147 will represent “
^0nnn See above (Produces ASCII on Macintosh).
^unnnn Unicode character search where "n" is a decimal number corresponding to the Unicode character value.
Note: Instructions on how to identify the required decimal number are included at the end of this page.
Note: To search for a specific field, such as an XE (Index Entry) field, use the following syntax:
^19 field name

ing it into practice

Example 1.
There are many occasions when you are presented with blocks of text or numbers etc., where the order of the text is not what you might
require in the final document. Swapping the placement of forename and surname as above is one such example - and don't forget you can
to the replacement, even when using bracketed replacements

e.g. you may wish John Smith to appear as Smith, John

or, more likely, you may have a column of names in a table, where you wish to exchange all the surnames with all the forenames.

You could do them one at a time, but by replacing the names with wildcards, you can do the lot in one pass.
Let's then break up the names into logical sequences that can only represent the names.

At its simplest, we have here two words - John and Smith. They can be represented by<*>[space]<*>. - where [space]is a single press
the spacebar.

Add the round brackets (<*>)[space](<*>) and replace with \2[space]\1

Run the search on the column of names and all are swapped. Run it again and they are swapped back.

Note: If you get it wrong, remember that Word's 'undo' function (CTRL+Z) is very powerful and has a long memory!

Example 2
This could be the changing of UK format dates to US format dates - or vice versa.

7th August 2001 to August 7th, 2001

To give an example of how most of the wildcards could be used in one search sequence to find any UK date formatted above to its equiva
US format date, the following search pattern will do the trick:

[0-9]{1,2}[dhnrst]{2} <[AFJMNSOD]*> [0-9]{4}

Breaking it down [0-9] looks for any single digit number, but dates can have two numbers so to restrict that to two, we use the count functi
We want to find dates with 1 or 2 numbers so

[0-9]{1,2}

Next bit is the ordinal 'th' - Ordinals will be 'st' 'rd' or 'th' so identify those letters specifically:

[dhnrst]

There will always be two letters, so restrict the count to 2

[dhnrst]{2}

Next comes the space. You can insert a space [space]

The month always begins with one of the following capital letters - AFJMNSOD. We don't know how many letters this month has so we ca
use the blanket '*' to represent the rest. And we are only interested in that word so we will tie it down with <> brackets.

<[AFJMNSOD]*>

there's another space [space] followed by the year. The years here have four numbers so

[0-9]{4}

Finally add the round brackets to provide a logical breakup of the sequence

([0-9]{1,2}[dhnrst]{2})[space](<[AFJMNSOD]*>)[space]([0-9]{4})

and replace with

\2[space]\1,[space]\3

to re-order the sequence.

Example 3
Assume you are parsing addresses and wish to separate the honorific from the name.
 American usage puts a full stop (period) at the end ("Mr.", "Mrs.", "Dr.") while British usage often omits the full stop.

([DM][rs]{1,2})( )

will find Mr Mrs Dr without the stop and

\1.\2

will put one in.

or vice versa

([DM][rs]{1,2}).

will find Mr. Mrs. Dr. with the stop and

\1

will take it out.

Further examples:
(*^13)\1\1 will match any sequence of three identical paragraphs,

(*^13)@ will match any number of replacement paragraphs. Replace with \1 to remove duplicates from a sorted list.

\<([!\<\>]@)\>[!\<\>]@\</\1\> will match any well-formed XML element including start-tag and end-tag (“<p>some text</p>” or “<custome
name>John Smith</customer-name>”)

By creating logical sequences you can search for almost any combinations of characters.

Gremlins to be aware of (for advanced users only):

Sometimes Word will get confused if it encounters “escaped” brackets \( or \), for example “(\\)” will match *any* character, not only a
backslash

Workaround: use "([\\])" instead.

([a-z]\() throws an error - should find an "a(".

Workaround: Use ([a-z][\(]) instead.

Not a bug but still annoying: You have to escape any special character even if you type its code; so ^92 will have the same problems as ty
the backslash.

The construction {0,} (find zero or more of the preceding item) is refused as incorrect syntax. This concept is available in Unix regular
expression matching, so it's a curious omission.

You don’t always have to “escape” the special characters, if the context makes it clear that the special meaning isn’t wanted. [abc-] match
“-“, and [)(] matches “)“ or “(”. This may sometimes make your searches behave differently from what you expected.

ablish the unicode decimal number for a character -

When searching for a symbol from the extended character set using its unicode decimal number i.e. ^unnnn you first need to identify that
number.

First select the first example of the character (e.g. the Cyrillic character ю in the document, then activate the Insert > Symbol dialog. In W
2007
The dialog opens with the character selected:
Note the Unicode (hex) character code number - here 044E.

Open the Windows calculator and change its view to the Scientific calculator, ensure that the Hex radio button is checked and enter the
number into the calculator.

Click the Dec radio button and note the changed number
You can then use the four digit number in conjunction with the ^unnn (^u1102) to find the characters in the document.