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October 19, 2007
You’ll Find Me Using Word
Dear Larry,
I have a very long Word document which contains a large number of parenthetical
phrases, and I need to italicize all those phrases. I don’t relish the idea of
accomplishing that one phrase at a time; I’m working on a computer after all.
Isn’t there a way I can automate the process?
V. S.
Dear V. S.,
Indeed you can and indeed you will—by taking advantage of the advanced find and
replace features built into Word.
But before I get to advanced finding and replacing, maybe I should remind
everyone about basic finding and replacing! You can find text within your
document by pressing Ctrl+F on the keyboard (hold down the Ctrl key and tap the
F key) or by clicking Edit, Find in the menu bar. In the Find What box, type the
text you’re looking for and press Enter.
Similarly, you can replace text in your document with other text. For instance,
suppose you wanted to replace all occurrences of “John Doe” with “Jane Smith.”
Start by pressing Ctrl+H or by clicking Edit, Replace. In the Find What box,
type “John Doe” (without the quotes). In the Replace With box, type “Jane Smith”
(without the quotes). Click Replace All, and Abracadabra! Any and all references
to “John Doe” will now have been replaced with “Jane Smith!”
The particular problem at hand requires some fancier footwork. You don’t want to
find and replace a specific phrase in parentheses, but rather any phrase in
parentheses. Furthermore, you don’t want to replace the found text with other
text; instead, you want to change the formatting of that text.
Fair enough. We’ll start with the challenge of finding any phrase bound by
parentheses. First, press Ctrl+H to call up the Find and Replace window. We’ll
need to expand this window to display all of the advanced features so if you see
a button at the bottom of the window that contains the word “More,” click it
now.
In order to find any text, we need to turn on wildcards so put a checkmark in
the Use Wildcards box. For our purposes, the * (asterisk) is a wildcard
character recognized by Word that can represent any number of characters.
Unfortunately, the open and close parentheses characters are also wildcards so
we must precede each with a backslash in order to tell Word we’re looking for
the actual parenthesis character. Therefore, typing “\(*\)” (without the quotes,
of course) in the Find What box will be translated by Word into find any phrase
surrounded by parentheses.
Now click inside the Replace With box. We don’t want to replace the found phrase
with a different phrase so type the special characters ^&
(Shift+6 followed by Shift+7) in the Replace With box. Next, at the bottom of
the window, click Format, Font, select Italic, and click OK.
You’re ready to go. Click Replace if you want to replace one parenthetical
expression at a time, or click Replace All and go for broke!
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
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