MS Word Legal: Having Total Control Over Your Search and Replace Function

Having Total Control Over Your Search and Replace Function A great feature that can do some damage. By Louis Ellman What is this about? Sometimes, we want to use search and replace to take care of something that may not be for the entire document but for a selected (highlighted) portion of text. For instance: 1. You have 10 lines in a particular paragraph with a of (I), (ll), (lll) type numbering system throughout the 10 lines of the paragraph and you want to quickly protect that particular paragraph with non breaking space after each closed parenthesis so that the numbers do not separate from the word that follows. 2. Another example would be multiple areas in a document that have inside addresses, multiple line letterheads or multiple line Titles where you want to make use of soft returns instead of hard returns. 3. Finally, you have an area of text that says "for a period of 20 days" numerous times in a particular paragraph and you need to switch that over to 25 days for just that particular paragraph. How Do We Better Control Our Global Replace Items? Highlight the area of text that we wish to affect with our global replace. Use the Control H shortcut to bring up your Find and Replace Dialog Box. 1. When you run the global replace, it will do the replace on the text you "highlighted" and give you a message that it has made X number of replaces and asks if you wish to continue for the remainder of the document and to that you say "NO" 2. Not paying attention and you saying YES, can possibly do a lot of damage to a large document and you May Not Even Notice. 3. If it were a small document, you most probably would notice a repetitive error and take action to "Undo" the problem. In a large file, this type of error could be replicated 100's of times and barely noticed. For instance, just the other day I saw an error whereby every instance of "it" was replaced with it's which is fine but every word with the letters "it" now has it's such as Bit's, Reit'serated and on and on. 4. In sum, when you run a global replace that involves highlighting a selected portion be alert, run the global and say NO to continuing. Selecting a targeted area of text gives YOU control when running the global replace function. It also will prevent a document wide error. One of the few teaching Top-Tier Legal www.advanceto.com