WD98: Can't Find Text Using Wildcards with Find or Replace (179114)

SYMPTOMS

When you use wildcards with the Find or Replace command (on the Edit menu), you receive one of the following messages:

When You click Replace All

Word has completed its search of the document and has made 0 replacements.

When you click Find, Find Next, or Replace

Word has finished searching the document. The search item was not found.

These messages may appear although the text you are searching for to replace exists in the document.

For example:

To find and replace all occurrences of words beginning with the character "s" and ending with the character "t," as in the word "sat," in the Find text box you would type "s*t" (without the quotation marks). You must use wildcards for this search to work. For example, in this case, the asterisk is used as a wildcard that will find any string of characters between the starting and ending specified characters.

NOTE: To use wildcards you must turn on the Use Wildcards option. To turn on Use Wildcards, while in the Find or Replace dialog box, click the More button and click to select the Use Wildcards check box.

CAUSE

By design, when you use wildcards to search for text, the search text is case sensitive. This is true even when the Match Case check box is not selected. The text you are searching may contain a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters. That is, as described in the example mentioned earlier in this article, if you search for "s*t" and the text in your document is, for example, "Sat" (note the capital S), Word will not find the text because it is looking for a lowercase "s", as in "sat."

WORKAROUND

To work around this behavior, search for all combinations of both lowercase and uppercase characters.

For example, to find all occurrences of words beginning with the character "s" and ending with the character "t," as in the word "sat," search the following combinations:

s*t
S*t
S*T
s*T

MORE INFORMATION

For more information about finding text, click the Office Assistant, type "Why can't Word find the item I'm searching for?" click Search, and then click to view "Why can't Word find the item I'm searching for?"

NOTE: If the Assistant is hidden, click the Office Assistant button on the Standard toolbar. If Microsoft Help is not installed on your computer, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

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