Replacing Text and Capitalizing a Letter in One Step

Here are some references on using wildcards.
http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/UsingWildcards.htm
http://www.funduc.com/regexp.htm

Someone else's command strings often don't do exactly what you want. With an understanding of wildcards you can modify them to suit your exact needs. For example the word paragraph might be legitimately embedded in the text but when intended as a flag it is followed by several spaces. The following will detect if the word has two or more following spaces.

[pP]aragraph^32{2,}([a-zA-Z])
^p1

The command {2,} will search for two or more of the preceding character. Similarly, {2,4} will find only two, three or four spaces.

@Ken Endacott - that is a very nice explanation of wildcards and using expressions - kudos!

Mohan
You probably haven't ticked Use Wildcards.

Richard
The Find string is essentially a list of instructions telling what to search for.
[pP] is one character either p or P. With wildcards Find is case sensitive so you need to specify both.
Then follows characters to spell out the rest of the word paragraph or Paragraph.

^32 is the ASCII value of a space character. You can use an actual space but it can be difficult to see how many spaces there are or even if a space is present.

[a-zA-Z] is one character in the range a to z or A to Z.

The round brackets create a group which in this instance is a single alphabetic character.

The replace dialog consists of ^p which is a paragraph mark followed by 1 which gives the result of grouping 1 (if there are several groupings they are 1 2 etc.)
All Caps is applied to the replace so that the alphabetic character will be replaced by the same character in upper case.

In summary, Find will search for the word paragraph or Paragraph followed by one space followed by an alphabetic character. Replace replaces what is found by a paragraph mark and the alphabetic character in upper case, in the process deleting the word paragraph.


Harold
Your suggestion is a worthwhile refinement that would also delete a leading space. Otherwise the space will end up preceding the paragraph mark.

You'll have to explain that a bit more. I recognise 32 as space (with a delimiter ^) and ([a-zA-Z]) as any letter, and ^p as the paragraph mark, but what about the rest?

I don't know why, but it is not working in my work. I use MS Word 2007

Include the space before the word paragraph in the find dialog.

^32[pP]aragraph^32([a-zA-Z])

Include a period in the replace dialog.

^46^p1