Find & replace (Word Xp)

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Hello Everyone:

Can anyone advise me on the following:

Yesterday, I used the find and replace, I had to remove one small sentence, then replace it with one single line sentence. I even included the commas, but the find and replace wouldn’t work.

Can anyone shed any light on what I did wrong?

Thanks dillon

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Please be specific. “One small sentence” and “one single line sentence” does not tell us much.

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Hello Hans

Replace: As we are only inviting the praticipation of a limited number of industry leaders, it is important that you send your reply before July 30th 2004.

Replace with: I will be contacting you, in the event that you may withs to discuss this opportunity further.

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If you search for a sentence with “praticipation”, and the actual sentence contains “participation”, you won’t find it. More generally, if you are looking for longer pieces of text, the chance that there is a small discrepancy increases – spelling errors, double spaces instead of single spaces, etc. So check very carefully that the Find What box contains exactly what you are looking for,

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Hello Hans

Although I have spelled participation wrong in this thread, that was not the problem, each word and comma was correct, not to sound ungrateful, but are you saying the the find and replace can only handle small or large single wording?

dillon

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No, I don’t mean that Find/Replace cannot handle large amounts of text, but that there is a higher probability of mistakes, or differences if you will. If I enter one word into the Find What box, I can see at one glance whether it is exactly the same as what I’m looking for. With a longer piece of text, a small difference with the text in the document would be hard to notice, but it would still cause Word to fail finding the text. If Word cannot find what you entered in Find What, there MUST be a difference, however tiny, between this text and the supposedly corresponding text in the document.
Oh, and check if you’re not accidentally searching for text with specific formatting or performing a case sensitive search – that might be left over from a previous search.

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Some other reasons why a Find/Replace might fail (though they don’t sound likely in the current case):
— There’s hidden text and you do a wildcard search.
— There are fields and you do a wildcard search.
— You tried to paste more than 255 characters into “Find what”.
— The text contains characters that are invisible (like optional hyphens) and you are doing a wildcard search.
— The text contains characters that look similar, but have different codes (smart quotes versus straight quotes, non-breaking spaces or hyphens versus regular ones, …); this is also more of a problem in wildcard searches.

Perhaps you can pin down the problem if you first search for the first half of the sentence, then the second half.
If one of those fails, check halves again. That should pin down the problematic stuff (character? field …?) quickly.

Klaus

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I just did a test: If “July 30th 2004” is a date field, “Find what: July 30th 2004” will match, even “before July 30th 2004” will match, but “before July 30th 2004.” will not.

Klaus

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I just did a test: If “July 30th 2004” is a date field, “Find what: July 30th 2004” will match, even “before July 30th 2004” will match, but “before July 30th 2004.” will not.

Klaus

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Some other reasons why a Find/Replace might fail (though they don’t sound likely in the current case):
— There’s hidden text and you do a wildcard search.
— There are fields and you do a wildcard search.
— You tried to paste more than 255 characters into “Find what”.
— The text contains characters that are invisible (like optional hyphens) and you are doing a wildcard search.
— The text contains characters that look similar, but have different codes (smart quotes versus straight quotes, non-breaking spaces or hyphens versus regular ones, …); this is also more of a problem in wildcard searches.

Perhaps you can pin down the problem if you first search for the first half of the sentence, then the second half.
If one of those fails, check halves again. That should pin down the problematic stuff (character? field …?) quickly.

Klaus

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Hello HansV, Jscher2000,Klaus Linke:

Thank you so kindly everyone for your help, HansV, I will always keep in mind the importance of your thread,
Jscher, thanks for showing me the way, much appreciated. Kaus, thank you for taking the time to test the wildcard concept.

Regards,

dillon

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Hello HansV, Jscher2000,Klaus Linke:

Thank you so kindly everyone for your help, HansV, I will always keep in mind the importance of your thread,
Jscher, thanks for showing me the way, much appreciated. Kaus, thank you for taking the time to test the wildcard concept.

Regards,

dillon

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Hello Hans

Although I have spelled participation wrong in this thread, that was not the problem, each word and comma was correct, not to sound ungrateful, but are you saying the the find and replace can only handle small or large single wording?

dillon

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If you search for a sentence with “praticipation”, and the actual sentence contains “participation”, you won’t find it. More generally, if you are looking for longer pieces of text, the chance that there is a small discrepancy increases – spelling errors, double spaces instead of single spaces, etc. So check very carefully that the Find What box contains exactly what you are looking for,

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This might be a good case in which to try wildcard searching. You can match the first and last few words of the phrase and, assuming it is unique (big assumption), it should go off without a hitch.

Added: The asterisk can match a very large number of characters, but you definitely need to test it carefully when your searched-for phrase spans paragraphs or pages.

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This might be a good case in which to try wildcard searching. You can match the first and last few words of the phrase and, assuming it is unique (big assumption), it should go off without a hitch.

Added: The asterisk can match a very large number of characters, but you definitely need to test it carefully when your searched-for phrase spans paragraphs or pages.

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Hello Hans

Replace: As we are only inviting the praticipation of a limited number of industry leaders, it is important that you send your reply before July 30th 2004.

Replace with: I will be contacting you, in the event that you may withs to discuss this opportunity further.

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Please be specific. “One small sentence” and “one single line sentence” does not tell us much.

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