Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Pay Attention to Case when Searching for ASCII Codes.

Pay Attention to Case when Searching for ASCII Codes

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated February 1, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


You may already know that you can search for most anything when you are using Word's searching tool. One of the things for which you can search is any character's ASCII code. What you may not know is that searching for an ASCII code is not case sensitive.

What does this mean? When you search for an ASCII character such as ^0065 (the capital letter A), you should not expect Word to only return the letter A; it also matches with the lowercase letter a, which is an ASCII code of ^0097. This anomaly only happens when searching for alphabetic characters.

To get around the problem, make sure you utilize the Match Case check box, the same as you would if you were looking for letters instead of ASCII codes. In other words, if you only want ^0065 to match with an uppercase A, then you should make sure that Match Case is selected before doing your search.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1517) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Pay Attention to Case when Searching for ASCII Codes.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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