Searching and replacing > Advanced search options

If you click on the Enlarge button in the dialog box of the ribbon command Home | Search or Home | Replace , the dialog box expands to offer additional options.

Clicking on Reduce makes the dialog box smaller again.

The enlarged Search and replace dialog box offers the following additional options:

"Options" section

Here, you can change the following settings for the search operation:

▪Case-sensitive

The case of letters in the search term is ignored by default. Thus, if you search for "house", not only "house", but also "House", "HOUSE", "HouSe", etc. will be found.

If you enable this option, however, the program will only find those occurrences of the search term where the cases of the letters correspond exactly to the cases of the letters in the search term. Thus, if you search for "house", only "house" will be found.

▪Whole words only

If you enable this option, the search term will only be found if it occurs as a separate word.

Thus, if you search for "test", it will be found only when it occurs as a separate word and not when it forms part of another word like "testament" or "protest".

▪Search from top

Write usually starts a search at the current position of the text cursor. If you enable the option Search from top, however, Write starts at the beginning of the document.

If the option Search backwards is enabled, the option Search from end appears here instead. This works accordingly.

▪Search backwards

If you enable this option, the search is performed backwards, that is, from the current position of the text cursor to the beginning of the text.

▪Search all frames

By default, Write searches only in the text frame in which the text cursor is currently positioned. If the text cursor is in the body text, only the body text is searched. If you enable this option, however, Write searches the body text and all existing text frames (including headers and footers).

"Reset" button

The Reset button deletes the content of the Search for field or the Replace with field (including formatting) – depending on which of these two fields contains the text cursor.

"Format" button

The Format button allows you to search documents for specific formatting – for example, for all sections of text in bold print or for all centered paragraphs.

Click on this button and set the formatting for which you want to search.

For more information on this function, see the next section (Searching/replacing formatting).

"Special" button

The Special button allows you to search a document for special characters and to use wildcards such as "Any character":

▪Any number (^#) – if you specify, for example, a search for "200^#", Write will find occurrences of 2000 through 2009.

▪Any letter (^$) – if you specify, for example, a search for "^$", Write will find occurrences of a through z and A through Z (including all letters with umlauts or other accents).

▪Any character (^?) – Write searches for any character whatsoever (letter, number or special character).

▪Any smart quote (^q) – Write searches for any type of smart quote. (In contrast, neutral quotes like "or" will not be found.)

▪Caret (^^) – searches for the character "^" (caret).

▪Non-breaking space (^n) – Write searches for non-breaking spaces.

▪Tab (^t) – Write searches for tabs.

▪Line break (^z) – Write searches for manual line breaks (inserted with Shift+↵).

▪Paragraph mark (^a) – Write searches for the paragraph mark that is at the end of each paragraph.

▪Page break (^p) – Write searches for manual page breaks inserted with the command Insert | Break | Page break.

▪Section break (^s) – Write searches for section breaks inserted with the command Insert | Break | Section break.

▪Chapter break (^c) – Write searches for chapter breaks inserted with the command Insert | Break | Chapter break.

To insert such a wildcard into the search term, click on the Special button, and then select the desired placeholder by clicking on it.

You can repeat and combine these wildcards as desired within the same search term. Furthermore, you can use them in combination with normal text. A search for "^#^# gallons of ^$^$^$" would yield all occurrences of this form – for example, "10 gallons of oil", "42 gallons of gas", etc.