

The Wildcards option has been in Word for a long time but it’s really not enough in the 21 st Century. will find the character 8 if it occurs between 2 and 5 times in a row eg, 7889 or 78889 but not 789 or 788888889. – A hyphen indicates a range of characters in alphabetical order. will find the characters listed inside the brackets. b?g will find big, bag, bug, beg and bog, in anything with a single character between a b and g. Choose ‘Use Wildcards’ from the Advanced Find menu then look at the Special button again … it’s changed to show the wildcard options. The ‘Use Wildcards’ option gives you more options for varied searches. The better workaround is to select the character in a document (using the Alt + X trick if necessary) then paste it into the Find field for a search. It seems there’s a upper limit on the numbers accepted by Find. We tried looking for the Grinning Face Emoji ? (Unicode Hex:1F600 Dec:128512) and Word can’t find it. That feature was changed in Word 2007 onwards which is why some older web pages get this wrong.īut there are limits. įor example ^u03B8 should find the Greek Theta symbol but instead you need ^u952 (Hex 03B8 = Dec 952) Unicode characters are almost always quoted using Hexadecimal codes but Word wants decimal. ^unnnn finds a Unicode character according to its DECIMAL value, not the more commonly use Hex values. Searching for ^153 won’t work, use ^0153. Since all ASCII characters are three digits, you have to prefix the search with ^0. ^nnnn will find an ASCII character by it’s four digit number ^0153 will find the Trademark ™ symbol. Word has a fast way to find Unicode or special characters but it’s very strange. Finding Unicode and other Insert | Symbol characters. However, we recommend practicing a little so that the function provides you with the desired result.Use replace to change twin line breaks to a paragraph mark or nothing (to remove unwanted line breaks). If you want to replace capital letters with lower case letters, select “More” and check the “Match case” box.įind and Replace in Word is a very powerful tool.
#Microsoft word find and replace blank lines pdf#
This function is often used when copying texts from other formats – for example websites or PDF documents – into a Word document. enter two paragraph marks consecutively) in the “Find what” box and enter a single paragraph mark in the “Replace with” box, you can then confirm with “Replace All” to automatically replace all double paragraph marks in the text with a single paragraph mark. If you select “Special” and then the “Paragraph mark” option, Word automatically enters “^p” in the search box. To do this, go into the input screen for the function as normal and open up the advanced search options by selecting “More”. For example, if you want to remove unnecessary paragraph marks, you can also do this using the Find and Replace function. However, certain character strings represent particular functions. The “Find and Replace” function in Word is indifferent to the kind of characters you want to replace. Word’s Undo function reverses everything in an instant. If you have established that your Find and Replace feature in Word is not working as you want it to, you can easily undo the last action performed. The Find and Replace function does make all the requested replacements throughout the text and takes absolutely no account of possible distortions made to your text.

It’s highly likely that the spell checker will mark up all of these nonsense words for you.

The problem is that you might not immediately notice these changes. This will turn “hand” into “hor”, “command” into “commor” and “understand” into “understor”. Wherever Word finds the character string “and”, it will blindly replace it with “or”. If you want to replace the word “and” with the word “or”, it is crucial that you copy the spaces before and after the word “and”. Let’s imagine you want to edit the recurring phrase “Press button A and B” in a text. Therefore, it is important to know what the result will look like before you use the function.

But what many people fail to consider is that as easy and convenient as the function appears at first glance, it also has plenty of stumbling blocks to avoid. The function is particularly efficient if an existing text only has to be changed slightly.
