On our office computer, TTTand I are running the Korean version of MS-Word 2000, version 9.0.2720.
Now, we have a huge document (1177 pages, rougly 60% English and 40% Korean text) that we are currently working on… part of our work includes searching for bolded English words through this document so we can make a list of them for referrence.
Problem: the search function in Word doesn’t seem to be working right… it’s skips words, ignores some, etc.
Anyone have any insight into why this is happening? Is there a limit to how long a document you can search through? Is there any free software available that would do it any better?
I don’t see why there would be a limit on the length of a document that can be searched. (Do you really have the 1,177 page document as a single file?) How are you searching for the bolded English words? I’ve never had a problem searching for bold, but I’ve never searched for a specific language.
FTR: we have broken it into several small documents to make it easier to work with…
Still haven’t solved the searching problem, though. I think there is a conflict between the Korean software and the English software… got us stumped, so we’re working around that aspect (IE: I doing the searching part at home, where I have only English software on my computer;)).
It’s not working. Still skipping items, ignoring items, etc.
Let me re-phrase: after setting all the parameters to what we want (in this case, bold font, 12-point, Times New Roman font), it STILL skips over things… we know this because we have searched on words that we are looking at in the document (for example: “something” which occurs maybe 10,000 times (no exaggeration in this document!), and watched as it picks up maybe 50 or so "something"s… we have also picked a unique word (zonk, total occurance in the document: 6), and watched as the search came up with 0 occurances of that word (when I can scroll right to it! There it IS!!).
You could be right about the difference between the two versions. Back in the old days, the order of the code would make a difference (whether you did the bold, then changed the typeface or changed the typeface, then did the bold). That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore (at least not in the English version). If you were using WordPerfect, I’d suggest using the reveal codes functions to see if there are extraneous codes in there that might be screwing up the search. One of Word’s biggest drawbacks is that it doesn’t have this function.
Good luck – it sounds like doing it at home is working.
I’m shooting in the dark here but here’s a possibility that could apply if you weren’t the creator of the document. If you created the document and are sure those sections really are bold, ignore the rest.
Maybe some of the text you’re looking for isn’t actually bold. It might be a different font that just looks similar to the bolded normal font. Likewise, rather than bold, the skipped sections might have some other font attribute such as shadow or outline that just looks bold on your monitor.
A co-worker asked me for help in removing abbreviation from a long document - something she’s done hundreds of times. For example, she searches for “LD” and changes them all to “Long Distance.”
We selected a sentence that contained the text “LD” then rant the correct search function… Word missed it.
I know that the Search tool was being used properly. Drove me nuts… then I gave up.
