Wildcard Find and Replace with Track Changes

Thanks Jay and Pam for the workarounds offered.

In our organisation, the document compilers all send their documents to me for editing. Using track changes, I edit the documents, and return it to them to either accept or reject my edits (normally not too much of the latter). It therefore serves a secondary function to educate the compilers about our particular document standards.

But, if it ain't working, it ain't working. I guess the Word users just haven't shouted loud enough.

Thanks a million guys!

I realize this thread is pretty old, but I thought I'd post a partial workaround in case someone runs into this same issue, although for the example given above, the workaround won't work.

I was trying to replace

1Q 2010

with

1Q10

and getting the same kind of result with track changes on: 110Q (right elements, wrong order).

My original string looked like this:

Find what: ([1-4])Q [0-9][0-9]([0-9][0-9])

Replace with: \1Q\2

By making the Q a wildcard, I was able to get it to work.

Find what: ([1-4])([Q]) [0-9][0-9]([0-9][0-9])Replace with: \1\2\3

This won't work with the original poster's example because he is actually changing the found text from a space to a hyphen. Maybe someone can think of a way to extend the workaround to work for such instance, but this is at least something.

Hope this helps someone.

-Vince

I just encountered this problem myself in Word 2013. Here is a workaround that seems to work with track changes switched on:

Sub Workaround()

'Adds a hyphen between the 1 and 2 in "12"

With ActiveDocument.Content
With .Find
  .ClearFormatting
  .Replacement.ClearFormatting
  .Text = "(<[1])([2]>)"
  .Replacement.Text = ""
  .Forward = True
  .Wrap = wdFindStop
  .MatchWildcards = True
  .Execute
End With
Do While .Find.Found
  .MoveStart wdCharacter, 1
  .Collapse
  .InsertAfter "-"
  .MoveStart wdWord, -1
  .MoveEnd wdWord, 1
  .Copy
  .Delete
  .Collapse wdCollapseEnd
  .Paste
  .Find.Execute
Loop
End With

End Sub