Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 17, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016
Greg has a large document that uses smart quotes throughout it. He needs to replace some, but not all, of the quote marks and apostrophes with their non-smart equivalents.
This is actually a rather common occurrence. Many people use smart quotes in their documents to give a more "finished" look to what they are writing, but sometimes need to have regular quote marks and apostrophes used in some instances, such as when noting minutes and seconds with times in the text.
The trick to doing this type of search and replace is to turn off Word's smart quote capabilities. Follow these steps:
Figure 1. The AutoFormat As You Type tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box.
Now you are ready to do your find and replace operation:
Figure 2. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
Use the controls in the dialog box to step through each occurrence of the character and replace it, if desired. Find and Replace will find every occurrence of the character you entered in step 2, regardless of whether it is "smart" or not. Since the smart quotes option is turned off, the replacement will be a regular quote mark or apostrophe, as desired.
There is one caveat to the information presented here: If you are doing a search with wildcards turned on, Word is much more discriminating in what is looks for. While a regular search doesn't differentiate between regular and smart quotes, a wildcard search does. Thus, you can't just type a regular quote in the Find What box when doing the wildcard search. Instead, you must hold down the Alt key and use the numeric keypad to type the correct code for the smart quote character you want: 0145 (opening apostrophe), 0146 (closing apostrophe), 0147 (opening quote), or 0148 (closing quote).
There is no way to avoid stepping through all occurrences of quote marks or apostrophes in the document, as they all must be examined so you can determine if you want to make a change. When you are done making your changes, make sure that you turn smart quotes back on (use the steps earlier in this tip), if you normally type with them turned on.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7551) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Replacing Some Smart Quotes.
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2020-12-17 12:30:34
Austin
Prime and double prime marks are actually the proper symbols to use for feet and inches. Their character codes are 2032 and 2033 respectively, and they can be assigned to keystrokes, such as alt+'. If you use these characters for this purpose instead of quotation marks and apostrophes, then you'll never have to worry about their being replaced by smart quotes. Also your finished document will look more professional.
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