Hi all,


I've tried my best to convert the find-replace knowledge that I've learned from here into a macro, but I just can't get it right. I'm trying to build a macro that will convert all instances of:

.{tab}The {text} according to any one of examples {lownum}-{highnum},

into

.{tab}The {text} according to example {lownum},

In the above:
{tab} represent a tab character (e.g. ^t).
{text} can be any text and should remain as-is. If it is difficult to achieve this without unpredictable results, then it would be ok for this to be a single word.
{lownum}-{highnum} represents a range. Their absolute and relative values are unimportant. The number before the hyphen (i.e. {lownum}) should remain as-is, while the hyphen and the number following the hyphen (i.e. {highnum}) should be deleted.

Record yourself doing a Find and Replace with wildcards turned on

Find
according to any one of examples ([0-9.]{1,})-([0-9.]{1,})

Replace with
according to example \1

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hmm. This is what I did:




but the output seems to be:



The {text} {lownum}according to example ,




For example:



The frog 1according to example ,


I can't figure out why the number is appearing in such a strange place. Any ideas?

The () brackets in the Find box define the region of the found text
The \1 in the replace box tells Word where to put the contents of the first () bracketed item

If you are getting 1according then it tells me you put the \1 in the wrong place

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I'm with you on that. I included that screenshot of my find-replace window specifically because I expected you'd think I'd typed the strings incorrectly!

But I've identified the culprit: The weirdness occurs if track changes is on. With track changes switched off, your approach works perfectly - thank you!



If you can figure out a way to make this work with track changes switched on, that would be wonderful. (I like to be able to look over the results of a macro each time I run it, in order to verify that it performed as expected.) But if that isn't possible, no worries, and I thank you again for your help.