Searching for Special Characters

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

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

Finding Fields
Fields allow you to add all sorts of dynamic information to your document. If you need to find those fields, there are several ways you can accomplish the task. This tip covers shortcuts and searching techniques you can use.

Pay Attention to Case when Searching for ASCII Codes
Word allows you to search for specific ASCII codes in a document. If you use codes to search for alphabetic characters, you may get more than what you bargain for.

Quick and Dirty Paragraph Count
Need to know how many paragraphs are in a document? You can use Word's Find and Replace feature to get a count quickly.

Quickly Changing Tab Alignment
Need to change the alignment of some tabs in a multitude of paragraphs? How you approach the problem depends on whether those paragraphs are formatted using styles or not.

Searching for ASCII and ANSI Characters
The Find and Replace feature in Word is very powerful. It even allows you to search for any ASCII or ANSI characters, by code. This tip explains how to enter those codes so the characters can be easily found.

Searching for Breaks
You already know that you can add breaks to your document, to force some sort of change to the text. If your document is quite long, finding these breaks can be a chore unless you know how to use Find and Replace to locate these special characters.

Searching for Footnote and Endnote Marks
Do you want to quickly search for any footnote or endnote marks in your document? Word makes it easy using the standard Find and Replace dialog box.

Searching for Non-Black Text
Searching for text having (or not having) specific formatting is generally pretty easy. It is more difficult to search for text that is not a particular color. This tip explains how you can find just want you want by using a macro.

Searching for Optional Hyphens
If you have a document that contains optional hyphens (special characters that mark where a word can be split between lines), then you may want to use the Find and Replace tool to locate them. You can easily do that by following the steps outlined in this tip.

Searching for Paragraph Marks and Line Breaks
Paragraph marks (created by pressing Enter) and line breaks (created by pressing Shift+Enter) are two of the most common special characters in a document. Word allows you to easily search for these characters, using the method described in this tip.

Searching for Special Characters
When using the Find and Replace feature of Word, you can search for more than plain text. You can also search for characters that have special meaning or purpose in your document. This tip shows how easy it is to find these characters.

Searching for Special Hyphens
Word allows you to use several different types of hyphens in your documents, for various purposes. When searching, you may want to find specific types of hyphens; this tip shows you how.

Searching for Tabs
Tabs don't normally show up in your printed document, but Word allows you to still search for them. All you need to do is use the special code (^t) recognized by Word as a tab character. This tip explains how to utilize that code when searching.

Searching for Text that Does Not Have a Certain Format
You can easily use Find and Replace to find text that has a particular format to it. Most people don't know you can use the same tool to find text that does not have a particular format. Here's how to do this type of search.

Searching for White Space
White space permeates our documents, and sometimes you'll need to search for that white space. Word makes it easy to select this special class of information through the use of the Find and Replace feature.

Special Characters in Pattern Matching
The most powerful search engine in Word use pattern matching, but the way you specify special characters in a pattern-matching search is different than in a regular search. This tip examines some of the differences that can affect how you do your searching.

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.