I am updating this thread to ask an additional question, which I think is rather important. Is it also possible to use this macro with additional matching options available in the GUI or VBA? I am thinking of IgnorePunct and IgnoreSpace, but also searching for italics, for example. They are not technically wildcards, so I understand that this may be complicated or impossible. Thanks!

You can add all manner of conditions; it just requires more columns for them to your workbook. If you're going to work with/without formatting parameters, you also need to set the Format property appropriately; setting italics, for example, wouldn't be enough on its own. See, for example, the discussion starting at: https://www.msofficeforums.com/word-...html#post93796

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I understand, but I think it is overkill for what I need. More specifically, what I would need is to just search for italicised (just about everything), rather than searching for specific italicised words. I am not sure I am making any sense, though.

In that case, insert:
.Format = True
.Font.Italic = True
before (or after):
.Text = strFnd

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

Thanks! I have now tried it and the macro runs. However, it does not return any results (though it should have). I will investigate further. Paul (if I may) I am truly grateful for your help. You have already made my life significantly easier!

I am bumping up this thread as I am now trying to do something different, that is to say, extract the expressions contained between certain marks. So, for example, I would like to extract the word "artist" if it is between three asterisks and three asterisks "***" And "***", like so:

***artist***

I understand that I would have to change something in this part of the code, but I have not been lucky so far.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thank you!

You would have to change:
.Text = strFnd
to:
.Text = "***" & strFnd & "***"

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

Thanks Paul! However, I think I have not made myself clear at all—my mistake, really.

My user case is a little more specific. Since most of the paragraphs I want to extract feature a reference, I thought I would first collect the references to then collect the paragraphs. To do so, I would use the fact that most paragraphs contain a reference written in italics. By finding all italicised text, I would be able to create a collection of search strings, from which I can then remove the duplicates to conduct the search. In this context, I would be looking for strings, not the complete paragraph

The trouble is, as you told me above, searching for italics may be a problem. So I thought I'd replace all italic text with tags, such as the *** discussed above. (Though if there is a way to do this with italics, that would be amazing.) After doing that, I can either look for every string matching the *** tag (or italics, if at all possible) and create a list. Which will in turn allow me to search through my collection of documents. Does it make any sense?

Again, thank you so much for contributing to this.

Searching for italicised text isn't a problem at all; you can even use italics as a Find parameter without specifying anything else about the text (i.e. you don't need to know what the text is). The only issue with the F/R using Excel as the source for the F/R expressions is that, if you want to find some text with/without a given attribute and other text regardless of that attribute, you'd need a column in Excel to hold those parameters.

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