Gretchen Jones

Wildcard characters you can use when searching (displayed at right below)

Note that wildcard search and replace can be very tricky so be careful.

I did a wild card search for sas and it returned every PARAGRAPH that ended with sas. Even <*sas which should (in my mind) have returned each word ending in sas instead returned SENTENCES that ended in sas.  I should have used <(*sas) I think or even better (sas)> for words that end in sas. (looking for the word Kansas if you’re curious).

So a search using wildcards for the word condo would be formatted <(condo)> I think. (Starts and ends with condo).  That should return condo but not condolences.  Helpful when doing a search and replace.  Play with it in a COPY of your manuscript or some other document.

You can get really complicated with this if you want to. You have to check the “use wildcards” box below the search and replace box.

Be very careful and make a copy of your work before doing a search and replace using wildcards or any big risky search and replace.

Incidentally I’ve been using MS Word for more years than I can remember and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten wildcards to work.  I’ve got a degree in computers so it’s not particularly intuitive.  (or I might be a moron – you never can tell)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 9:16 am and is filed under Technology, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.