The < and > characters specify that whatever follows or precedes, respectively, must represent the start or end of a string, rather than simply occurring somewhere within another string. Note that we're discussing Word wildcards here, not RegEx, per se. for more on Word wildcards, see: Finding and replacing characters using wildcards

I answered your question about | in post #5.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]