Crash when using wildcards in "Find" function

[Janaki]

I saw that someone had posted a similar problem on this
list a while back, but there didn't seem to be a solution
or even a confirmation of the problem posted.

I am trying to do a "Find & Replace" on groups of colons
) that are at least 15 consecutive chars together. I
used the following in the Find field-->

:{15,}

with the "Use Wildcards" option selected.

On hitting OK, Word unexpectedly quits. I thought it might
be that the colon char was a special char, so I replaced
all the colons with the capital letter "O", and it did the
same thing. Has anyone seen anything like this? Is there
a work-around (other than writing a macro, which I don't
mind doing, but i hate to do it when there's supposed to be
a built-in function to accomplish the task!)
thanks in advance,
janaki

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Janaki,

First, please always state your OS and Office version numbers when posting.
If you're in Word 2001, you may need to increase Word's Preferred memory
(try 48,000K and leave Minimum memory alone). If you're in Word X, have you
installed at least the 10.1.2 updater?

Admittedly, I don't know much about wildcard searches but I just took a look
at the following article ­
<http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/pwWordwildcards.aspx>
­ and now I'm curious. What happens if you search on :{15} or, for that
matter if you actually type fifteen colons? Do you still get the crash?

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>