In addition to searching for exact text, the Find and Replace tool also includes a handy feature that allows you to search using wildcards. You can use this feature to find things like variations of a word or groups of words. Use the following articles to learn how to search with wildcards in Word.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Wild Card Searching' topic. Click the article''s title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

   Adding an Ellipsis to the Beginning of Some Paragraphs
The Find and Replace feature of Word is very powerful. You can even use it to add a unique character to the beginning of selected paragraphs. The trick is defining what those "selected paragraphs" look like.

   Formatting Partial Results of a Search
The Find and Replace capabilities of Word are, simply, quite astounding. This is particularly true when using wildcard patterns in your searching. This tip presents a way to use a wildcard pattern to format only a portion of what is found by the pattern.

   Matching At the Beginning or End of a Word
The pattern matching capabilities of Word's search engine are quite powerful. You can tailor your search pattern so that whatever you specify must occur at the beginning or end of a word.

   Ordering Search and Replace
The wildcard searching available in Word is very powerful. Here's how you can use ordering in your search efforts to make your replacements easier than ever.

   Replacing and Formatting at the Same Time
The Find and Replace feature in Word is very powerful. So powerful, in fact, that you can change the formatting on variable-length text while removing text surrounding the original text. Here's how.

   Replacing Text and Capitalizing a Letter in One Step
The Find and Replace capabilities of Word are very powerful. You can even use them to do some complex and specific searching and replacing, as described in this tip.

   Replacing Two Tabs with a Space in Limited Situations
The Find and Replace feature of Word is very powerful, allowing you to finely target exactly what you want to search. This tip examines one such scenario, where fine targeting is required.

   Searching for Characters
When using pattern matching in a search, you can specify individual characters or ranges of characters you want matched in the search. This tip explains how brackets are used to denote exactly which characters should be considered a match when searching.

   Special Characters in Pattern Matching
The most powerful search engine in Word uses 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.

   Specifying a Number of Matches
The wild card searching capabilities of Word are amazing. One thing you can do with wild cards is to specify not only a character (or character range) to match, but also how many times that character should be repeated in what is matched. Here's the low-down on how to add this power to your searching.

   Understanding Pattern Matching
Pattern matching is a type of searching you can do in Word that is very powerful. Despite its power, it remains rather esoteric to many Word users. This tip provides an overview of what pattern matching is and how you can turn it on when searching.