Since the time of day is the only portion of that string that changes throughout the document, I positioned my cursor on the time portion, pressed to toggle into overstrike mode, and typed question marks (?) over each character in the time string, up through and including the greater-than symbol (>), as shown in Figure B.
However, if I clicked the Replace or Replace All button at this point, I’d only get rid of one of the date and time strings-the one stamped 08:59:46 P.M. Next, I clicked the More button and activated the checkbox for the Use wildcards option, and then typed JD: followed by two spaces in the Replace with field. Next, I pressed H to open the Find and Replace dialog box and pasted that string into the Find what field. To begin, I selected the first string, beginning at the left margin and including the colon, and pressed C to copy that string. To demonstrate how it works, I’ll show you how we got rid of all of the date and time stamps that precede the phrase SPEAKER_jdavis:, and replaced those strings with my initials, JD, a colon, and two spaces. One of TechProGuild’s editors, Mike Jackman, showed me the trick he uses to clean up these transcripts, and it couldn’t be easier-I had simply never tried it before. We want to remove all of the date and time stamps from this document without visiting each line manually.
#Microsoft word find and replace asterisk how to
The problem, of course, is how to get rid of those date and time stamps. The system that generates the transcript of the chat stamps each line with the current date and time, as shown in Figure A. (You can read excerpts from the transcript here. Recently my colleagues at TechProGuild, TechRepublic’s subscription-based service, invited me to host an online chat about tech support. Here’s how that feature saved the day for me recently. That capability can save you and your users lots of editing time. However, by the time you do that, you might as well just delete the strings manually after you’ve selected them.įortunately, the Find and Replace dialog box lets you use wildcard characters to locate similar (but non-identical) character strings. You just globally replace the character or phrases with nothing.īut what if the character strings aren’t all the same? You could resort to copying the strings and pasting them into the Find and Replace dialog box. Have you or your users ever opened a file in Word only to discover that the document contained a lot of “garbage” or extraneous characters? Chances are, you probably used Word’s find and replace feature to clean it up. Jeff Davis demonstrates how this advanced feature works. There's one thing users don't realize about Word's Find and Replace featureyou can use wildcards to "find" strings that are similar but not identical.
Using wildcards when you find and replace in Word
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