Make Word bold everything between [ and ]
October 4, 2017 3:49 PM Subscribe
How can I tell Word to make everything that appears in square brackets bold, including the brackets, in an existing document?
Basically I have a Word document which contains [text like this]. Sometimes it's [text: like this] or even [text: 123/456 like, this]. Basically any damn fool thing could appear between those square brackets. I need to make every instance of [text like this] into [text like this]. There has to be a better way than searching for [ and then manually selecting and bolding the text that it finds. This document is about 125,000 words and I have a few more like it that need doing, so making this automagic is high on my priority list.
I've found this AskMe but I haven't been able to alter it to do what I want. If there's a way to make Word do what I need, using this kind of system, I'd love it if someone could tell me how to do it. I just can't figure out how to change the (^013[!:]*:) it suggests in the Find box to match my needs. I am not that good with computer.
Thanks!
Basically I have a Word document which contains [text like this]. Sometimes it's [text: like this] or even [text: 123/456 like, this]. Basically any damn fool thing could appear between those square brackets. I need to make every instance of [text like this] into [text like this]. There has to be a better way than searching for [ and then manually selecting and bolding the text that it finds. This document is about 125,000 words and I have a few more like it that need doing, so making this automagic is high on my priority list.
I've found this AskMe but I haven't been able to alter it to do what I want. If there's a way to make Word do what I need, using this kind of system, I'd love it if someone could tell me how to do it. I just can't figure out how to change the (^013[!:]*:) it suggests in the Find box to match my needs. I am not that good with computer.
Thanks!
Best answer: brainmouse beat me to it. But you'll need to enter it like this:
(\[*\])
in the Find field for it to work.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:04 PM on October 4, 2017
(\[*\])
in the Find field for it to work.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:04 PM on October 4, 2017
Huh, not sure if that varies by which version of Word you're using, but I definitely do not need to put it in parentheses for it to work. It works either way.
posted by brainmouse at 4:08 PM on October 4, 2017
posted by brainmouse at 4:08 PM on October 4, 2017
Response by poster: Thank you, EndsOfInvention and brainmouse. You just saved me a lot of irritation!
posted by Sternmeyer at 4:09 PM on October 4, 2017
posted by Sternmeyer at 4:09 PM on October 4, 2017
Ah yeah, good point, I'm on Word 2007 (which is a decade old now good lord). And in fact now I try it a second time it does work without brackets ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:13 PM on October 4, 2017
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:13 PM on October 4, 2017
This thread is closed to new comments.
The reason you want that is:
you're looking for brackets, [ and ], but those are special characters in search, so you have to add "\" in front of them to say "no no, i really want to find these characters"
* is the wildcard for "find anything"
Make sure you expand the options and that "Use wildcards" is checked.
posted by brainmouse at 3:59 PM on October 4, 2017 [4 favorites]