Finding Missing Spaces before Numbers

Tracey proofreads loads of documents and was wondering how to find where a word and number have been combined accidentally as the space wasn't included, such as "and317." She wonders how she can perform Find and Replace to eliminate this issue.

This sort of task can be easily done with Find and Replace. First, let's say that you just want to find occurrences that you note—a letter followed immediately by a digit. You can do that by following these steps:

1. Display the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (In Word 2007 just press Ctrl+F. In Word 2010 or later versions, press Ctrl+F to display the Navigation pane, then click the down arrow at the very right of the Search box in the Navigation pane, and finally choose Advanced Find.)
2. In the Find What box, enter ^$^#. These codes tell Word you want to find any letter followed by any digit.
3. Click Find Next.

At this point, Word will find and stop at the next occurrence of a letter followed by a digit. You can, at this point, make any edits desired and then continue searching.

For Tracey's purposes, though, it might be better to let Find and Replace do the heavy work. Follow these steps:

1. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Click the More button, if it is available.
3. Make sure the Use Wildcards check box is selected.
4. In the Find What box, enter "([A-Z,a-z])([0-9])" (without the quote marks).
5. In the Replace With box, enter "\1 \2" (again, without the quote marks). (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. Getting ready to find a letter followed by a digit and insert a space.

6. Click on Find Next. Word finds the first occurrence.
7. If you want to insert the space, click Replace. If you don't want to insert the space, click Find Next. Either way, Word finds the next occurrence.
8. Repeat step 7 until Word reports it is through.
9. Close the Find and Replace dialog box.

The key to these steps is steps 3 through 5. You are telling Word that you want to do a wildcard search. Then, in step 4, you are defining a pattern for what should be found. You are specifying that you want a letter in the range A-Z or a-z followed by a digit in the range 0-9. The inclusion of the parentheses in step 4 is very important, as they define matches that can be referenced in step 5. There, the \1 indicates you want to use whatever was matched by the pattern in the first set of parentheses in step 4, and \2 indicates you want the match from the second set of parentheses. Note that between these two there is a space, so the result is that you are inserting a space between the letter and the digit.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13848) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.