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 simple dynamic content to your document. Here's how you can find the fields when you need to know where they all are located.
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
Need to get down to the "character level" when searching for information in a document. Word allows you to search for any ASCII or ANSI character you want, as described in this tip.
Searching for Breaks
Word allows you to insert different types of breaks in your text that help control how your document is paginated. If you want to search for those breaks, use the technique described here.
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
Word allows you to search not for special characters that normally do not print such as paragraph marks and line breaks.
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 a couple of different types of hyphens in your document, each with a different purpose. If you want to use Find and Replace to locate those hyphens, you'll want to note the special searching codes you can use.
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.
