If this is a search and replace activity, you don't NEED to exclude the correct word since you would be replacing it with itself.
Find: EVENING NEWS ???? WALTER
Replace with: EVENING NEWS WITH WALTER

To examine why the search you did isn't working.


1. [!WITH] will be looking for a single character other than those 4 letters. If you wanted a 4 digit word then you would need [!WITH]{4}
2. However that fix wouldn't work as expected because your search would exclude any four digit word that happens to contain any one of those letters. Since 'I' appears in BIFG it would be missed in the search.
3. It still wouldn't work if you got specific about the placement of excluded characters looked for [!W][!I][!T][!H] because if the second letter is I as per your example, that won't get found.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

The advantage of using * instead of ???? is that the OCR process may have created more or fewer than 4 characters instead of WITH. The disadvantage, is that is may make false matches (e.g. EVENING NEWS WITHOUT WALTER)

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]