Advanced Search in Microsoft Word

[gwpriester]

I am working on my fifth paperback book using Designer Pro X 16. One of the problems I have is pasting text from Microsoft Word as Rich Text Format, then selecting Match Colors and Styles. This brings in italics and bold face but screws up other things such as paragraph indents.

And if I apply my Normal text style, then the bold faced and italic pasted text reverts to plain text.

So I did a search to see if there is a way in Microsoft Word to search for just italicized text, and here is what I found.

In Word, click the small down facing arrow to the right of the search box and select Advanced Search.

In the Advanced Search and Replace dialog, press the Ctrl key and key in i (for italics) or b (for bold) and the Find Next.

I was able to search and replace every instance of italics in half an hour.

Another trick I discovered. If for example there is an italicized in that occurs in the phrase, the wall was covered in red wallpaper, in Xara enter the search phrase and it goes right to where it occurs.

[Boy]

Very useful tricks. Thanks for sharing, Gary!

[mwenz]

Yes, shortcuts (like the font style shortcut(s) you mention) beat going through Word's menu/button system every time (it's available using the More drop-down, font, etc too). MickeySoft sure makes it difficult.

As regards resetting styles in Xara products, this issue is why most layout applications have the options as seen in the screen shot below when the need arises to reset a paragraph back to its base styling.



Without these types of options, it is onerous to me (emphasis on the me part, Gary) to set text in an Xara product. A novel takes a 2-3 hours to typeset in a layout application as long as the source (typically a Word file) is even reasonably constructed. If it is a difficult layout, it may take another hour to run through and page one or two more times.

[gwpriester]

Not to mention Master Pages would have made the process faster. Still and all, I am happy how the book has turned out.