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Old 08-27-2019, 06:53 AM
kilroyscarnival kilroyscarnival is offline Windows 7 64bit Office 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Genericname1111 View Post
Is there a way to represent text after the first letter of each line as a wildcard that I can exclude, so that I can then find repetition between the first letters of lines?
I like the styles option for your future work.

This isn't an elegant solution, but depending on how much text you have, it may serve your purpose.

Copy your entire segment of text in Word and paste into an Excel worksheet. You may have to check that your defaults (from your last use of text-to-columns) is not going to automatically delineate by space or comma. Depending on your styles and formatting, it could drop the text into separate cells by paragraph.

Then insert a column to the left of all your text. Using the LEFT formula, you can ask it to return the leftmost, or first, character, in that cell to the right. (Example: "=LEFT(B2,1)" where B2 contains your first paragraph, and 1 is the number of characters you want it to return. You could then filter (and perhaps color code, to aid your at-a-glance review) for every Q and every A to make sure that they run in sequence. Filter the Q's and make the background yellow, and the A's blue, and when you unfilter you can see at a glance there should be a yellow/blue/yellow/blue pattern.

Or, for that matter, use Find/Replace in Word to replace every "Q:" with a "Q:" that is a larger font and bright red, and similarly for every "A:" or how you have it formatted, in green. It should be easier to eyeball down the pages, and at the end you can use your styles to reset the formatting back to normal.
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