Hi Paul, thanks for replying. I did see this information somewhere on a Microsoft page, but I'm not sure where anymore. It could be I was reading something for VBA and confused it with Word 'Find'. My impression was that regex could be used in find and replace but only if the 'Wildcards' box was checked. '|' is certainly a standard part of regex, but I think what I've learned in reading around since I made this post is that Word's regex capabilities are pretty inferior, so it's likely this just hasn't been included in the functionality. It would certainly be useful, but I don't have any illusions I'm going to motivate a corporation with Microsoft's corner on word processing to add functionality to my liking Thanks again.