Converting Text Inside Double Asterisks to Bold

David has information that he's imported into Word. The information is plain text, and anything that is supposed to be bold is surrounded by double asterisks, as in **this should be bold**. David wonders if there is an easy way to convert this double-asterisk convention into actual bold text.

This can be accomplished relatively easily using Find and Replace, as long as you do your searching and replacing with the aid of wildcards. Follow these steps:

1. Press Ctrl+H. Word displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Click the More button, if it is available. Word expands the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The expanded Find and Replace dialog box.

3. Make sure the Use Wildcards check box is selected.
4. Enter the following in the Find What box: \*\*(*)\*\*
5. Enter the following in the Replace With box: \1
6. With the insertion point still in the Replace With box, click the Format button and then choose Font. Word displays the Replace Font dialog box. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Replace Font dialog.

7. Using the Font Style list, choose Bold.
8. Click OK to dismiss the Replace Font dialog box. You should notice the phrase Font: Bold appears under the Replace With box.
9. Click on Replace All.

What happens is that Word finds all instances of text within double asterisks, deletes the asterisks, and formats the text as bold. This is done because of the pattern you entered in the Find What box (step 4). The backslashes just before each asterisk cause Word to treat them as actual characters, not as wildcards—which asterisks normally are. The \1 in the Replace With box (step 5) indicates that you want to replace the matched text with whatever is within the first set of parentheses in the Find What box. That asterisk within the parentheses does not use a backslash, so it is a wildcard that matches any text.

The steps to perform the changes are easy to accomplish, but if you do this type of replacement quite a bit, you should consider using a macro to perform the task. You can do so by using the Macro Recorder while you perform the above steps. The macro will look very similar to this:

Sub BoldDoubleAsterisks
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.Font.Bold = True
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = "\*\*(*)\*\*"
        .Replacement.Text = "\1"
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = True
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchWildcards = True
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

Run the macro, and all the double-asterisk enclosed text in the document is affected. You can also assign the macro a shortcut key or add it to the Quick Access Toolbar to make it more accessible.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11222) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.