Word Hacks [Electronic resources]

Hack 29 Exclude Text from Find and Replace

This hack turns "Find what" into "Find not what."

Say you're editing a scholarly book that contains dozens of block quotations from old journals. The author has consistently misspelled several geographical and personal names, so you get ready to fire up Find and Replace.

But waitalthough you want to replace the author's misspellings, you don't want to replace the original misspellings in the block quotations. Those should be reproduced verbatim. And you certainly don't want to OK every replacement by hand in this long, long book.

Though you can't explicitly tell Word what text not to search in, this hack takes advantage of the fact that Word automatically ignores any hidden text in its searches.

Let's say all of your block quotations use Word's built-in Block Text style. If you set the text in that style as hidden, Word will skip over it during your Find/Replace.

Select FormatStyles and Formatting (FormatStyles in Word 2000). Choose the Block Text style and click the Modify button.

In the next dialog, click the Format button and choose Font to display the dialog shown in Figure 4-8.

Check the Hidden box, click the OK button, and then click the OK button again to exit the Modify Style dialog. Finally, click the Close button on the Styles dialog to return to your document.

All of the block quotations will have disappearedas long as you're not displaying hidden text. If you still see the block quotes, select ToolsOptions, click the View tab, and check the "Hidden text" box.

Now, with your block quotations hidden, you can find and replace the misspellings in the rest of your text.

Once you finish, just repeat the above procedure (this time unchecking the Hidden box) to make your block quotations visible again. All of your block quotations will reappear, with their misspellings intact.

Jack Lyon