I'm using a 2003 Word and have a huge word document in which to search for any one of the words 'has' 'have' 'had' 'having'. What I came across is this: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...102350661.aspx
After struggling with the so-called regular expressions, I finally figured out the following: <(ha[v|s|d]*)>
Input in the Find What field, this regular expression found me any one of the above-mentioned words.



Now here come my two questions:
First, is there an easier or more intuitive way to perform the aforementioned search in Word 2003?
Second, using the regular expressions, I now would like to search for any one of the phrases: 'have to' 'has to' 'had to' 'having to'. But when I typed in the Find What field the following, Word didn't just return 'have to' but also phrases like 'have something to': <(ha[v|s|d]*)> <(to)>. Any suggestion to fix this expression will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
Regards,
Jung

Hi Jung,

When searching for words like 'has' 'have' 'had' 'having', why not just do an ordinary search for any one of the word forms and check Word's 'match all word forms' option?

For the 'has/have/had/having to' search, you could use a wildcard Find, where:
Find = <[Hh]a[sdveing]{1,4}> <to>

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

Paul,
Wow, you've saved me hours of work. Can't thank you enough!
Now, I wanna look into the expression to figure it out myself