Hi pimpong,

In a wildcard Find, ^ acts as a control code for passing ASCII codes. That's why you can't use it directly. The same restriction applies to a number of other characters (eg {}[]\?#*()<>). So, if you want to find them, you need to insert ^ followed by the corresponding ASCII code or, in some cases, \ followed by the character. See Word's Help file for details.

If there's always a space before the ^_^ when it's not part of a (^_^) string, simply insert a space at the start of the Find and Replace expressions. Otherwise, you could use a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ([!(])^94_^94
Replace = \1happy
In this case, the ^94 acts passes ASCII 94 (ie ^) to the Find expression as a string rather than as the literal ^, and the Find process decodes it.

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