Hi all,



I am trying to find a way to search for similar words cited in the same passage / paragraph of text. I am doing that so I can build a collection of passages citing works of the same authors. The idea is to be able to find passages that contain two or more specific words / expressions, which could be somehow far apart.

in my pipe dream, I would have one operator searching for (by way of example):

"Tolstoy" and "War and Peace" and "first edition"

and then another searching for

"Tolstoy" and "Anna Karenina" and "second edition"

Of course, I could search for one and refine the search later, but there are quite a few similar instances and, most importantly, I have so many cases that this could be very complicated. Moreover, I would like to be able to use the paragraph-exporting macro that macropod so kindly and cleverly created to do the bulk of the work.

I have no idea if this is possible, and I cannot seem to be able to understand whether there is some wildcard syntax that would make it so. If, however, this is possible, my life will be immensely easier.

Thanks a lot!

I hope this is not wrong, but I think I have found an answer and I'd gladly contribute it to the knowledge base. I am asking the administrators to please remove it if it is wrong.

I had fairly good results with this type of wildcard:

. I am not quite sure yet of whether it only stops at the paragraph end, but it seems promising.

You might try a wildcard Find expression like:
Find - <(word)>[!^13]@<\1>

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thank you! To be clear, in your version it would be something like:

Find - <(Tolstoy)>[!^13]@Karenina<\1>

Or am I just misunderstanding the syntax?

Thanks!

The expression I posted would find any two instances of the whole word 'word' in the same paragraph.

If you want to find Tolstoy before Karenina in a paragraph, you'd use:
Find = <(Tolstoy)>[!^13]@<Karenina>
The < & > symbols are there to ensure you get whole-word matches only.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

This is extraordinary and solves so many of my problems that I cannot even begin to tell you how much the months to come will be made easier.

As a follow-up question, is a Word / Office wildcard cheatsheet available somewhere? Most of the documentation I have found was a little fragmented.

Thanks!

Beyond that, I also wonder if it would not be possible to use something like the Fuzzy Lookup addin (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down....aspx?id=15011) for something like this.

See:
https://support.office.com/en-us/art...4-7708c6c779b7
http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm
I don't know of a fuzzy-match addin for Word. That said, using VBA there are numerous additional matching options available, including:
• IgnorePunct - ignores punctuation in found text
• IgnoreSpace - ignores extra white space in found text
• MatchAllWordForms - (also available via the GUI) finds all forms of the find text, e.g. if the text to find is "sit," "sat" and "sitting" are also found
• MatchPhrase - ignores all white space and control characters between words
• MatchPrefix - matches words starting with the search string
• MatchSoundsLike - (also available via the GUI) matches words that sound similar to the text to find
• MatchSuffix - matches words ending with the search string
• MatchWholeWord - (also available via the GUI) matches only entire words
These don't all work with wildcards and I've rarely needed to call on any of them. YMMV

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

This is excellent. Thank you so much!