In such a situation, the common solution would be to simply type it phonetically (as it sounds) and then move on.
If someone uses a word you are not familiar with in such a situation, you don’t really have the time find out how to spell it properly. This function may be of use for people who type up conversations between people in real-time. The find feature was indeed able to determine that I was searching for the word ‘fonetikalee’. As a test, I wrote down ‘fonetikalee’ in a document and searched for the word ‘phonetically’ with the ‘Sounds like’ option activated. To make this point, searching for the word ‘phonetically’ with the ‘Sounds like’ option switched on, will find all of the words that would sound like the word ‘phonetically’ if you were to say them out aloud. The ‘Sounds like’ option is a type of search mechanism for words that may have been spelt phonetically. For example, sat?n finds “satin” and “satan”. The next most commonly used wildcard is the question mark (?), which can be used to substitute for any single character. Your results could be anything from “aim” to “antidisestablishmentarianism”. Then you could write “a*m” as your search term. For example, just say you want to find all words that start with “a” and end with “m”. The asterisk (*) is the most commonly used wildcard to search for a string of one or more characters. The second way is to simply type in the wildcard character directly into the ‘Find what’ box! Then type any additional text into the ‘Find what’ box. To do this, click the ‘Special’ pull-down menu and select the desired wildcard character from the resulting list. The first is to choose the particular wildcard character from a list. There are two ways to incorporate wildcards into your search query string. The ‘Match case’ and ‘Find whole words only’ check boxes are now unavailable (grayed out). The first step to using wildcards in your search terms is to select the ‘Use Wildcards’ option, which can be found in find dialog box after clicking the ‘More’ button. With just a few special characters and the knowledge of what they represent, searching for strings that conform to a predefined grammar (or pattern) now becomes extremely easy. It is really just another name for a “regular expression”. Any character or set of characters can be represented by a wildcard character. Searching for the word ‘sport’ in the following text will not produce any matches: “Why are all the sports I want to watch on at the same time?” USE WILDCARDSĪ wildcard is a special character that you can use to represent one or more characters in a search string. Such a search is less intensive for the program and will therefore be faster with large amounts of text.īefore you go setting this option, be forewarned that it will omit any plurals from your search results. To further demonstrate my point, the word ‘in’ does not appear within the sample sentence on its own using ‘Find whole words’, but would be found twice within the word “finding” with that choice off.īy selecting the ‘Find whole words only’ option, Office will omit matches to any search query that is found _within_ a word of the document. The less obvious match comes as part of the tail-end of the second word of the text, which is ‘sample’. There is only one instance of the word ‘ample’ within the text, searching without the ‘Find whole words only’ option would actually find 2 matches. Let’s pretend that you are searching for the word ‘ample’ out of the following short text: “This sample sentence is one way to demonstrate the ample finding flexibility of Office”.
Feel free to try it for yourself in Microsoft Word. To demonstrate the difference between having the ‘Find whole words only’ option selected and not having it selected, I will use a very simple example. A ‘whole word’ is defined in Office as a group of characters surrounded on either side by one or more spaces or punctuation marks. ‘Find whole words only’ is a selectable option in Word that can be accessed in the Find feature (Ctrl-F) by clicking the ‘More’ button to display more specific search features.īut what does it mean to find whole words only? Isn’t that what a normal search is meant to do? Well… yes and no. It’s called Advanced Find but many long-time Word users will know it as the standard Find dialog that’s been in Word for many, many years.Ĭlick on the More … button to see a lot of power in Word’s Find.