Thanks Paul, yeh sadly UK formatting convention on books using single speech marks is my downfall. Looks like I'll have to do it the hard way, although the formula you gave me is still useful, it'll just take a little bit longer than I envisaged, but I'm sure it will still save me time so thanks again for your help, as I said before its much appreciated.

Hi Andrew, thanks for the advice as well, although I fear allocating all dialogue with a style would almost be as much work as what I'm already doing as the book is 1300 pages long, we'll its actually become two books, but the length is the same, either way it wouldn't be quick. Although I didn't really understand what you meant when you said I could separate the apostrophes from a dialogue close quote by the punctuation that precedes it, I take you meant if I had charcter styles for dialogue I could do this?