Add Power to Word Searches With Regular Expressions

One can automate many of those find-and-replace tasks. Microsoft Word provides a set of wildcard characters that one can use to build regular expressions, combinations of literal text and wildcard characters. One can use regular expressions to find text that matches a given pattern and then replace those matches with new text. If this all sounds complex, don't worry. This paper introduces it in easy steps, explain things as one goes, and provide several working examples. One can use the information in this column with Word 97, 2000, and 2002. The user interfaces vary slightly between the versions, but one can accomplish the tasks described here with each version.