Replacing an X with a Check Mark

Cindi wants to use Find and Replace to replace a capital X with a check mark character. Specifically she wants to use the check mark character available in the Wingdings font. She's a bit unclear on how to do this type of replacing, however.

Actually, getting the results you want are relatively easy. There are several ways you can go about the task, but they all follow these general steps:

1. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Click the More button, if it is available. The Find and Replace dialog box should expand. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

3. In the Find What box enter an uppercase X.
4. Make sure the Match Case check box is selected.
5. Place the insertion point in the Replace With box.
6. Click the Format button and then choose Font. Word displays the Font dialog box.
7. In the Font list, select the Wingdings font.
8. Click OK to close the Font dialog box. The insertion point should still be in the Replace With box, and the font specification you made should appear just under the box.
9. Type the character you want to use for your check mark. (More on this in a moment.)
10. Use the control buttons in the dialog box (Find Next, Replace, or Replace All) as desired to make your replacements.

This is fairly straightforward and should already be familiar to you. It is, after all, the basic method for doing most Find and Replace operations. The trick, however, is in how you do step 9. There are several ways you can specify the check mark character.

One way is to copy the check mark to the Clipboard before you start the steps. Just type the check mark into the document, as desired, and then use Ctrl+C to copy it to the Clipboard. Then, in step 9, you can either press Ctrl+V to paste it into the Replace With box or you can use the ^c characters to tell Word you want to use the contents of the Clipboard as your replacement.

Another way to specify your check mark is to remember that all characters have underlying character codes that are understood by Word. If you can find out the character code for the check mark (it is available in the Symbol dialog box if you use that method of creating the check mark), then you can use the code in the Find and Replace dialog box.

In this case, the character code for the check mark is 252, which must be entered using four characters and a carat mark. Thus, you would enter ^0252 in the Replace With box. When you do the replacement, you'll see the check mark (which corresponds to the character code) appear in your document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7645) 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: Replacing an X with a Check Mark.