How-To Geek
How to Search for Line Breaks, Tabs, and Special Characters in MS Word
Over at the Technet Magazine blog, they’ve posted a very useful article that explains how to search for special characters like line breaks, tabs, or even white space. All you have to do is use a special modifier in the search box.
For instance, if you wanted to search for a word with a tab character in front of it, you could use ^tWord or something similar. Here’s a few of the entries from the table:
| Search String | Searches For |
| ^l (lowercase L) | Manual line break |
| ^p | Paragraph break |
| ^n | Column break |
| ^m | Manual page break |
| ^b | Section break |
| ^t | Tab character |
Hit the link for the full list of special characters.
20 Helpful Search Strings for Finding Special Characters in Word [Technet Magazine Blog]
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Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 08/27/10
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