Wild Card

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Wild Card' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Automatically Formatting Text within Quotes
If you want to do formatting changes to quoted text within a document, figuring out exactly how to do it can be challenging. This tip discusses a couple of ideas you can use.

Replacing a Colon in a Sequence
Sometimes you'll run across the need to replace a very specific sequence of characters in your document. It is for these instances that Word provides the wildcard capabilities of Find and Replace. This tip describes a common sequence that needs searching and how you can replace it using wildcards.

Replacing Multiple Spaces with Tabs
If you get a document or some text that has multiple consecutive spaces used to align information, you'll undoubtedly be looking for a quick way to replace those spaces with tabs. Here's the absolute fastest way to do the replacing.

Searching for Characters
When using pattern matching in a search, you can specify individual characters or ranges of characters you want matched in the search. This tip explains how brackets are used to denote exactly which characters should be considered a match when searching.

Setting Table Values to Three Decimal Places
If you import information into a document from another program, the values you import may not be exactly to your liking. For instance, you might need to limit imported data to three decimal places. The best and fastest ways to perform this task are discussed in this tip.

Special Differences when Searching
Word includes two different search engines. Which search engine you choose to use will dictate what Word shows as available special characters.

Specifying a Number of Matches
When using pattern matching (wild cards) in searching, Word allows you to specify how many of a particular character should occur in order for a match to be made. This tip describes the parameter, surrounded by curly braces, and gives examples of how it can be effectively used.

Standardizing Note Reference Placement
When placing footnotes and endnotes in a document, it is normal that the references for these notes be placed after any punctuation that ends the clause or sentence to which the note refers. If you have a document that has many misplaced note references, you may be interested in this tip, which will switch the relationship of the note reference and the punctuation.

Understanding Pattern Matching
Pattern matching is a type of searching you can do in Word that is very powerful. Despite its power, it remains rather esoteric to many Word users. This tip provides an overview of what pattern matching is and how you can turn it on when searching.