Office 2007 find/replace formatting characters

[NickCanuck]

I recently upgraded to Office 2007, a decision which I am regretting more and more with each day. Things that worked perfectly in 2003 don't work at all in this "improved" version. Here's my specific problem:

I downloaded some page source to get at the underlying data. It was easy enough to use find/replace to strip out all the HTML (e.g. Find "<tr>" replace with ""); that worked fine. The problem is that the source included many extra paragraph breaks. I confirmed this by selecting "Show/Hide formatting", and saw that backwards "P" symbol.

Naively, I thought this would be "No problem". I go to Find, pick "Special", and choose the "Paragraph character", which shows up in the Find box as "^v". But when I actually PICK find, I get the message that "Word has finished searching the document. The search item was not found". Did a little reading here, made sure that I was matching the same font, etc., tried again - no help.

Now, there were a lot of extra spaces in the document as well, and when I used the Copy function to actually copy the spaces (as opposed to using ^s), and paste those in the Find box, that worked perfectly. But, I can't select the Paragraph character.

Any ideas on what to do?

[ZeDaX]

This looks like issue with the compatibility office files. I had a similar issue where I had created tables in a word file. I had saved that in Office 2003. But when I opened the same in Office 2007 has caused total mess. There were added up spaces. There is a compatibility pack released by Microsoft for such issue. You can find the same on the official site of Microsoft.

[NickCanuck]

Sorry, that was no help. Any other ideas out there?

[JAMES_911]

To find a word in Word 2007:

• On the “Home” tab of the Ribbon, go to the “Editing” group, and select “Find”… or use the shortcut key CTRL+F
• Type the word you want to find, then press enter
• If you want to make a change to a specific word, you want to use the replace functionality.

To replace a word/s in Word 2007:

• On the “Home” tab of the Ribbon, go to the “Editing” group, and select “Replace”… or use the shortcut key CTRL+H
• In the “Find what” text box, type the word you want to find
• In the “Replace with” text box, type the word that you want to replace the original word with
• To replace words one at a time, click “Replace”, if you want to replace every occurrence of the word in the document, click “Replace All”

Source: thenewpaperclip

[NickCanuck]

Geez, did you even bother to read my post?! I know how to use Find/Replace, thanks very much. My problem is that Word 2007 DOES NOT RECOGNIZE FORMATTING CHARACTERS SUCH AS LINE BREAKS IN THE FIND/REPLACE FUNCTION, which Word 2003 did. That's my specific problem, which I still would appreciate help with.

Primers on basic functionality are condescending and stupid.