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I would like to "Find and Replace" entire lines in Microsoft Office Word 2010 which match some criteria.

I tried to find the solution in the official documentation, but I didn't find the answer:

(btw. here are two more useful unofficial documents: Find and Replace using wildcards; Regular Expressions in Microsoft Word)

Example

For example: I would like to search for all the lines which have the "Heading 2" style, and replace them so that they get between ## symbols: so this is the original text: This is my title, and I would like to find it and replace it this way: ## This is my title ## (this way I could transform a text's title into a Wiki-compatible heading 2 without any external plugins (EDIT: sorry, in the meantime I realized the MediaWiki-compatible heading 2 style uses == instead of ##, but it doesn't change the main point)).

So after Ctrl+H, checking "Use wildcards", selecting Format > Style > Heading 2, I've tried this and it did NOT work: (*^13>) or (<*^13>), where ^13 matches "Paragraph break / 'carriage' return" (see this) - this made Word search madly, and the GUI got frozen for minutes (!). At the end, it didn't find anything (but I DO have texts with Heading 2 style).

Microsoft Word 2010 - Find and Replace (*^13>) - Not Responding (Use Wildcards checked)

OK, this is not the appropriate pattern, so what would be the appropriate way to search and replace entire lines in Word?

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  • This would be sooooo much easier if Microsoft found out about this new thing called "regex." For that matter, just adding a "start of line" option to their special things list would be a big help. – Carl Witthoft Dec 12 '18 at 12:54
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but for some reason I wasn't able to do this in a single search/replace operation:

Steps

  1. Before:

    1

  2. Replace empty string (format Heading 2) with "## ^& ##" (no formatting):

    2

  3. After first replace:

    3

  4. Replace "^p ##" (no formatting) with " ##^p" (no formatting) (be aware that there is a space at the beginning of the replace string!):

    4

  5. After second replace:

    5

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  • Thanks,this really solves it, with one exception: if I have multiple headers of the same kind after each other, like this: i.imgur.com/tJSFXT2.png; after Find and Replace (sorry, I forgot that in MediaWiki, for parsing headers, I must use == symbols instead of ## symbols, but this doesn't change the main point), Word places == symbols like this: i.imgur.com/aHABiBF.png, and after the 2nd replace, like this: i.imgur.com/HkBGRib.png, which means I have to put an empty line between each of them first!:) – Sk8erPeter Jun 10 '13 at 13:37
  • But I could solve my problem with your solution, so thanks, +1 and accepted! ;) This new line "bug" (?) you mentioned is really strange though. – Sk8erPeter Jun 10 '13 at 13:38
  • 3
    It seems the ^p at the end of the line is part of the text with style Heading 2. So when you attempt to replace Heading Text with ## <Search String> ##, what actually happens is that Heading Text^p is replaced with ## Heading Text^p ##. Thus the trailing ## ends up on the next line preceded with a space. I don't know how to restrict the search string from including the trailing ^p. – Karan Jun 10 '13 at 15:47
  • Yes, this can be the reason, thank you. It would be really good to know how to restrict the search and replace to exclude the newline character. Anyway, you solved it. :) – Sk8erPeter Jun 13 '13 at 12:46
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I know the question is old, but not finding any practical solutions here or other places, I thought I'd post the answer for posterity's sake.

Perhaps Word has made enhancements to the function that allowed me to perform a single replace operation that did the job the asker described:

Find What: (*{1,})

---Style: Heading 1

Replace With: \1

---Style: Normal

Note that using (*) instead of (*{1,}) eliminated the first character in the line. Apparently, there's some special meaning involved in (*) that I'm not inclined to research.

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