Surprising MS Word Functionality
I recently came across an interesting scenario. A friend of mine was editing a Word document that contained lots of references to Carbon Dioxide but using its abbreviation, CO2. The problem he had was that the abbreviation was written throughout as “CO2”. Naturally he wanted to replace this with the “2” in subscript.
Occasions like this call for a find and replace tool. Word’s own find and replace tool should cope with this right? After all it is just replacing like with like. The problem was that on the face of it, it didn’t. The “Replace” in the dialog does not account for subscript text. You can specify the format of the replaced text, but this applies to entire text string. Therefore “CO2” becomes “CO2”. Not good at all.
It was after a few emails that an ingenious solution was found. Word’s find and replace tool allows you to specify wildcard characters in the replace string. What is more, it has one or two that you may not have come across before. How about “^c”. Believe it or not, this replaces your text string with whatever is currently located on your PC clipboard.
So all that remained to be done was create a piece of text complete with the required subscript formatting and copy this to the clipboard. Once there, you can perform your find and replace but using the “^c” replace string. Genius! As previously stated, this works with anything on the clipboard (e.g. images). If I discover anything else like this about Word I may have to take back everything I’ve ever said about it 
Note: You can discover other find and replace wildcard treats by searching the online help.
I recently came across an interesting scenario. Another Technical Writer was editing a Word document that contained lots of references to Carbon Dioxide but using its abbreviation, CO2. The problem he had was that the abbreviation was written throughout as “CO2”. Naturally he wanted to replace this with the “2” in subscript.
Occasions like this call for a find and replace tool. Word’s own find and replace tool should cope with this right? After all it is just replacing like with like. The problem was that on the face of it, it didn’t. The “Replace” in the dialog does not account for subscript text. You can specify the format of the replaced text, but this applies to entire text string. Therefore “CO2” becomes “CO2”. Not good at all.
It was after a few emails that an ingenious solution was found. Word’s find and replace tool allows you to specify wildcard characters in the replace string. What is more, it has one or two that you may not have come across before. How about “^c”. Believe it or not, this replaces your text string with whatever is currently located on your PC clipboard.
So all that remained to be done was create a piece of text complete with the required subscript formatting and copy this to the clipboard. Once there, you can perform your find and replace but using the “^c” replace string. Genius! As previously stated, this works with anything on the clipboard (e.g. images).
If I discover anything else like this about Word I may have to take back everything I’ve ever said about it
