Turbocharging Word's 'Find and Replace'

Word's Find and Replace feature is a very powerful tool and I use it constantly to check consistency of spellings, capitalisation, and referenced authors' names and publication dates. I have been so busy using it, though, I have not explored it to the limit.

Recently I came across an aspect that was new to me: the wildcard tool. Why had I ignored that little tick box for so long? Used with care, it has almost magical results. Wildcards work by identifying a specific pattern of characters and replacing them with different characters; they can therefore be used in any instance which can be defined by a formula.

If in-text references include a comma (Jones, 2007) but the publisher’s guidelines specify a different pattern e.g. (Davies 2010), it is relatively straightforward to delete all the unwanted commas. By ticking the Use wildcards box in Find and Replace, inserting a formula to identify the unwanted pattern and than a formula to replace it, the commas disappear without the text being affected:

As a new user, though, I am cautious about using the facility to replace all instances at once; the compilation of correct formulas needs practice (in my case, at least) and I still prefer to make the changes singly until I am sure that there are no potential glitches in the results.