Special Characters for Find and Replace in Microsoft Word

''Find what'' Box Only

The following characters can only be used in the Find what box.

Character	String
^1 or ^g	Picture (inline pictures only)
^2, ^f (footnote), or ^e (endnote)	Auto-referenced footnotes or endnotes
^5 or ^a	Annotation/comment mark
^19 or ^d	Opening field brace (Use only when you are viewing field codes.) (Selects whole field, not just opening brace.)
^21 or ^d	Closing field brace (Use only when you are viewing field codes.) (Selects whole field, not just closing brace.)
^?	Any single character
^#	Any digit
^$	Any letter
^u8195	Em space Unicode character value search
^u8194	En space Unicode character value search
^b	Section break
^w	White space (space, nonbreaking space, tab)
^unnnn	Word 2000 Unicode character search, where "n" is a decimal number corresponding to the Unicode character value

The following characters can only be used in the Replace with box.

Character	String
^&	Contents of the "Find what" box
^c	Replace with the Clipboard contents

The following characters can be used in both the Find what and Replace with boxes.

Character	String
^9 or ^t	Tab
^11 or ^l	New line
^12	Page or section break (Replaces a section break with a page break)
^13 or ^p	Carriage return/paragraph mark
^14 or ^n	Column break
?	Question mark
^-	Optional hyphen
^~	Nonbreaking hyphen
^^	Caret character
^+	Em dash
^=	En dash
^m	Manual page break
^s	Nonbreaking space
^nnn	Where "n" is an ASCII character number
^0nnn	Where "n" is an ANSI character number

PROBLEM: How do I replace paragraph breaks in a text file or MS Word document?

SOLUTION: Using the Find and Replace dialog, use the escape character sequence ^p (shift-6 p) to search for or insert paragraph breaks.

For more information on "Find & Replace" click here.