WD2000: Can't Find Text Using Wildcards with Find or Replace (214201)

SYMPTOMS

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

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 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 type s*t. 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 More and select the Use Wildcards check box.

CAUSE

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 for 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 Microsoft Word Help on the Help menu, type troubleshoot finding and replacing text in the Office Assistant or the Answer Wizard, and then click Search to view the topic.