Advanced Find using Wildcards
The wildcard is an advanced finding feature that has some powerful options beyond the standard * and ? options.
Over in Office for Mere Mortals we’ve been talking about the Find features in Office (part 1 and part 2).
The wildcard feature has some powerful options beyond the standard * and ? options.
The beginning of a word can be represented by the “less than” symbol (). For example (inter)> finds “splinter” but not “interesting” nor “intercept”.
A group of characters to choose from can be represented by grouping them inside the square brackets [ ]. For example w[io]n will find both “win” and “won”.
A range of characters to choose from can be represented by specifying the alphabetical range inside the square brackets with a hyphen between them [-]. For example, [r-t]ight will find “right” and “sight”, but not “fight”. Ranges must be in ascending order.
Conversely, you can specify a group of characters that excludes a specific range, by adding the exclamation mark (!) to negate the statement. For example, t[!a-m]ck finds “tock” and “tuck”, but not “tack” or “tick”.
To search for a character that has been defined as a wildcard, type a backslash () before the character. For example, typing ? will let you find a question mark as part of your search.
Finally, you can use parentheses to group the wildcard characters and text and to indicate the order of evaluation. For example, typing will find “converted” and “conscripted”.
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