Hi, simple question for the right person: I've got a 350 page document which for work I have to insert [square brackets] around certain numbers throughout the doc.



The doc is mostly text, but there are references to section numbers like "see Section 3.1" and "see Section 10.13" etc throughout - I need to change them all so they read "see Section [3.1]" and "see Section [10.13]".

There are hundreds of these references so it isn't practical to edit one by one. I've done lots of research on wildcards for find and replace, so I have no problem finding these references <(Section )*(.)*> but can't work out how to do a single find-replace to insert the [ ] around all sorts of different numbers, without changing the numbers.

This is literally (ok not literally) killing me, spent hours on it so far. Please help!!

Solved my own problem and thought I'd post it in case it helps:

Find: <(Section )(*).(*)>

Replace: \1[\2.\3]

The wildcard '*' is a blunt instrument and should be treated with caution ... and you only need two pairs of brackets in the search string. I would have suggested

(Section )([0-9.]{3,})
replace with
\1[\2]

See http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
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