
Instead, each cell ends up looking like this:Įxcel is parsing the “replace” expression as a literal string. In Excel I use the replace functionality to find this: ~* and then replace it with this: \1\2\3 and with special font formatting. In Word I use the replace functionality to find this: (\) and then replace it with this: \1\2\3 and with special font formatting. I want to format the text inside each cell to be a specific font, size, weight and color. I have several cells that contain, , and so on. Is there any way I can get this exact functionality within Excel 2013? I have used it successfully in Word 2013 (thanks to this helpful article), but Excel seems to take my “replace” text as a literal string and will not parse my expression properly.

There’s no limit on what sort of characters (alpha, numeric, or symbols) Word is to find, or on how many there are. (*) - This tells Word to look for any characters after the opening square bracket.However, because the square brackets are special wildcard characters in their own right, you need to tell Word to treat them as normal text characters and not as special characters, so you put in a backslash ‘ \‘ (also known as an ‘escape’ character) before the [. (\[) - You need to find a specific character (the opening square bracket), so you need to enclose it in parentheses.If it’s all OK, save your document with the new changes. Once all replacements have been made, check that you got what you expected before making further changes to the document.Your Find and Replace dialog box should now look like this:įind and reformat text inside square brackets On the Font dialog box change the settings to what you want - in my husband’s case, this was 4 pt and blue - then click OK.Click the Format button, and select Font.Go to the Replace with field and type: \1\2\3.Type the following exactly (or copy it from here): (\).Put your cursor into the Find what field.Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog box.entire document, selected paragraphs, selected columns or rows of a table). Select the text you want to change (e.g.Meantime, here’s my solution, which works in all versions of Word: I explain what all the settings mean after these steps, if you’re interested.
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With some help from and a bit of trial and error, I figured it out. However, square brackets are special characters in wildcard searches, so they have to be treated differently.

This is an ideal job for using wildcards in Word’s find and replace. My husband wanted to select a long column of text and find any text that was inside square brackets and reformat it so that the text - and the square brackets - was 4 pt and blue (no, I don’t know why either…).
