Office 2007 find/replace formatting characters

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?

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.

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

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

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.