Wildcards (Wildcards)

We use wildcard characters in our search, when we don’t know the correct spelling of a word.
When you use wildcards in your search, the “Use wildcards” option is checked in the “Find and Replace” dialog box. (See previous lesson)
There are many different wildcards, although only a few are being used regularly.
For example, the asterisk (*) is the one that is most commonly used, I think.
An asterisk replaces any number of characters in a word.
An example:
If we consider b*t, then a couple of words such as bonnet, bat, boat, beet etc. are found.
The number and type of letter (s) does not matter, but if the word begins with b and ends with a t it will show up.

A second example of a wildcard is the question mark (?).
The question mark matches any character, it takes only one character into consideration.
If we look at the example, c?p, then the words cup, cap, and cop are found.
If you place two question marks between two characters, then it will search for two characters between the start and the final letter.

A third example of a wildcard character is the “at the rate of” (@) symbol.
The ‘at the rate of ‘ symbol replaces one or more characters which have close connection with the primary word, such as those words for which the @ sign stands.
For example, if you search for schools @ it will find the words place and school.

A final example of wildcard characters is square brackets [].
For example: [bt] it will display the following words: beacon and tasks, but not blame.
In other words, each letter in the square brackets is considered individually.

Click the “Special” button at the bottom of the “Find and Replace” dialog box in order to view wildcards. A complete list of wildcards can be found under the Help option in Word 2007.

Replace:

The “Replace” option allows us to replace certain words or phrases.  This is a lot faster than having to change each word individually.

Click the “Replace” button under the “Home” tab in the ribbon.  This opens the “Search and Replace” dialog box, in which the “Replace” tab is selected.
In the first text box enter the word you want to replace.
In the second text box, enter the word you want to replace the previous word with.
If you click on the “Replace” button, it replaces the first word that was found, with the word that is to be replaced, and starts looking for the same word in your document, and so on, and so forth, until your document is entirely replaced with the new word.
Clicking on the “Replace All” button, will replace all the words in our document similar to the word, by word that is to be replaced.
I hope you can follow this because, it’s harder to explain than to execute.

Wildcards can not be used in the “Replace with” text box.

The “Select Browse Object” button

The “Select Browse Object” button in the document allows you to navigate between different objects.
It can be found at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar on the right.
When you click this button, a menu appears with various objects, which you can browse:
Pages, sections, comments, footnotes, endnotes, fields, tables, image, header, and processing are some of them. The last two options, “Find” and “Go To”, open the “Search and Replace” dialog box.

Select an object from the popup menu, for example, “Section”, which you want to browse through.
“Word” will go to the first section in your document.
Click the “Next” button to go to the next section.
Click the “Back” button to see the previous section.

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