Hi,
I have a very large word document in which I need to search for all special characters (all characters apart from alphabet,numbers, space and comma) like ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + = - } { ] [ “ : ‘ ? > < / etc.


I actually need to find all such characters and remove space before and after all such characters. To do this manually will take me for ever!!
Can some one help me with an easier way to achieving this? May be using a macro with putting all unicode values of these special characters to do find and replace?
Kindly give me such a macro (or any other solution) for this... Need this urgently pls!

You should be able to do that with two wildcard Find/Replace operations, where:
Find = [^033-^043^045^047^058-^064^091-^096^123-^255][ ]{1,}
Replace = nothing
Find = [ ]{1,}[^033-^043^045^047^058-^064^091-^096^123-^255]
Replace = nothing

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

Hi Paul,
Thanks for your reply. It didn't seem to have worked. Steps followed as below:

1. In a word file just do ctl+F and find [^033-^043^045^047^058-^064^091-^096^123-^255][ ]{1,}
2. 'replace all' with nothing

3. again ctlr+F and find [ ]{1,}[^033-^043^045^047^058-^064^091-^096^123-^255]
4. 'replace all' with nothing

This did not work!

But alternatively what i have found is to run a macro to do the required stuff.
Thanks for your response anyways.

Did you check the 'use wildcards' option?

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