How to change the formatting of numbers without changing the numbers?

[sullengirl]

Hello,

I'd like to change the formatting of a large number of... numbers in Word. For instance, I'd like to turn superscript numbers into "normal" numbers inside parentheses (I'm working on in-text citations in a long scientific article). Like this:

According to Smith et al.³,...
According to Smith et al. (3),...



The obvious solution seemed to be to find and replace using the "any digit" function (^#), like this (it's in Portuguese but you'll understand):

Sem título.jpg

...but apparently Word doesn't recognize this code in the "replace" field. I thought it would change the formatting around the number while KEEPING the number in the text, but it doesn't work. I couldn't figure any helfpul wildcards either.

Do you have any tips on how to make this work? It's such a simple task, I can't believe Word won't do it.