Hi Paul, thanks for the help it's much appreciated. I tried your suggestion and subbed in the single curly speech marks and it worked to an extent, but there are problems with dialogue which contain words with apostrophes in. for instance, I searched for the word 'very' using the following formula with wildcards selected: (^0146[!^0145]@) very

And the find function highlighted the text I've marked in red below which is inside the dialogue. Obviously the extra speech mark used as an apostrophe causes the issue and now I wish I was American and used the double speech marks as this would bypass the issue. However, as I need to stay with UK standards changing the speech marks is not an option, so with this in mind can you see a way round this problem?

‘If that’s your argument,’ Walker said, ‘it’s not very convincing.’

Looking at it I would imagine it needs some kind of IF command, i.e. IF the apostophe ^0146 is followed by anything except white space then ignore, which would also bypass other words like they're, won't etc. Although knowing what I need to do and putting into practise are two VERY different things.