Hello everyone,

Is it possible in Microsoft Word to search for quoted text of a certain length?

I would like to search for any instances of text that falls between an opening and closing smart quotation mark in which the text totals 40 words or greater. (all quotation marks are formatted as smart quotes in the document)

The reason for doing this is because I have to locate all such quotes so that I can format them as block indented quotes. For now I am searching through and doing word counts of each quote but the document is about 400 pages so just curious if there is a way to expedite this, and it's a task I will have to do in the future as well.

Thank you in advance for any advice you might have!



I am currently on Word 2013, Windows 8.

Ah, just figured it out. Sorry:

I checked wildcards and used this search:

[^0147]*[^0148]

Then I'm looking at the bottom of the screen as I search through for the word count. Just figured I'd post the solution for anyone in the future. Thanks anyway!

Actually, you solution doesn't restrict itself to text having more than 40 words - it finds quotes of any length.

If one assumes an average word length of at least 5 characters, plus spaces, the following could be used:
[^0147][!^0148]{240,}*[^0148]
If that's too long for you, simply reduce the 240.

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

Very interesting Paul, thanks!

As a follow-up, I realized that this doesn't quite work as easily in Word for Mac. At least, the unicode values of 0147 and 0148 don't register, and I tried a couple of other unicode values that I saw online but didn't have luck, at least in my doc. After playing a bit, I realized that I could (after checking the wildcard box as usual) copy and paste in an opening and closing smart quote and just search for this: "*" Just figured I'd pass that along to save the next person the time.