# Replace bolded category to category?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/replace-bolded-category-to-category/652418>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 8, 2013, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/replace-bolded-category-to-category/652418 "2013-03-08T19:36:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Silver\_Tyger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/fbc32d/32.png) [@Silver\_Tyger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silver_Tyger)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2013, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/replace-bolded-category-to-category/652418/1 "2013-03-08T19:36:31Z")

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Sorry about the sucky title.

I’ve got an spreadsheet of words that I’m applying sound changes to and there’s three categories of letters - bold caps, caps, and lower case. The sound changer I’m using (and every other one) can only take unicode - so no bold. What I’ve been doing is taking it into the words into Word and find and replacing the bolded letters with circled letters (so, for instance, DYno **MITE** to DYnoⓂⒾⓉⒺ).

I’m wondering if anyone knows a way to do that automatically rather than manually. Yes, technically I could put the circled letters into the spread sheet, but I’m trying to avoid using unicode in there because it’s hard to read and that involves a lot more copy and pasting than my current method.

I screwed up a bunch of the sound changer code, which is now fixed and I need to reapply the sound changes to about 500 words. I shouldn’t complain. The Grimm brothers did this all by hand.

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**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2013, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/replace-bolded-category-to-category/652418/2 "2013-03-08T20:35:39Z")

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You don’t say what spreadsheet application you’re using, but in Excel 2010 you can do a find/replace all specifying Format. So you could replace any instance of **M** (format bold) with Ⓜ, for example. Make sure you specifiy “match case.” Unfortunately you’d have to do one letter at a time I think.

Hmmm - on second thought I just tried it and it won’t seem to replace partial cell contents. I might be doing it wrong though.

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**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2013, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/replace-bolded-category-to-category/652418/3 "2013-03-08T20:41:36Z")

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You could probably use the find/replace feature in Word, though, if you’re currently doing the replacements manually.

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**Author:** ![Silver\_Tyger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/fbc32d/32.png) [@Silver\_Tyger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silver_Tyger)\
**Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 5:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/replace-bolded-category-to-category/652418/4 "2013-03-11T05:35:15Z")

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> [@Skammer](#):
>
> You could probably use the find/replace feature in Word, though, if you’re currently doing the replacements manually.

That’s what I’m doing now. I was hoping there was a faster way. If I do it in Word, I then have to copy and paste each cell back (because the vast majority of the cells have multiple lines, which get pasted into Word as table cells, but pasting it back into Excel breaks them up).