Word find/replace (wildcard) works in doc 1, but not doc 2?!

Factual Questions
1

I have a Word 2000 wildcard-enabled search that looks like this:

Find:
([0-9])-([0-9])

Replace:
\1–\2

What it’s supposed to be doing is looking for date ranges that use a hyphen and replacing just the hyphen with an en dash (i.e., 2004-2007 changes to 2004–2007). Sounds great, no? Except:

[ul]
[li]It works fine in a test/scrap document. [/li][li]It worked fine as I composed this post in Word. [/li][li]It works fine when I copy and paste from my source document into a scrap document. [/li][li]It doesn’t work fine on the source document itself. Instead I get 2004-2007 changed to 20042–007. [/li][/ul]

Here’s how frustrating this is… the Find and Replace box stays on top of Word, even if it doesn’t have focus. That means I can switch back and forth between documents and run the exact same query on each. The same text that it mucks up in my source – the document I need to be working on – pasted into a new (or existing) document comes out fine. Nothing changes except I’m switching between documents.
Thanks Word, my sanity wasn’t fragile enough.
Any thoughts? A document property I’m missing? Intentional evil?

Thanks,
Rhythm

On preview, it seems that though en dashes are showing up in the thread posting box, they’re hard to seen in the post. For reference’s sake: hyphen, en, em dash = - – —

2

Problem identified: posting here in case someone searches the archives.

Turns out it’s a bug in Office software.

Some wildcard replacements have problems when tracked changes are on. This was happening on both this machine and my wife’s Mac. Grrr. As soon as tracked changes are off, the replace works fine.

I know of no workaround.

I am going to turn tracked changes off, resave, make all changes, and use compare documents to import the changes into my working file. Maybe. I may just make them untracked, and use a comment to tell the author and project manager.

Rhythm

3

Yup, there’s no known workaround. This “feature” is well known among copyeditors who do a lot of electronic work. You just resign yourself to keeping a big note on your monitor, in your head, wherever, to turn off TC for wildcard searches.

Here’s a link to a back issue of Jack Lyon’s excellent Editorium Update newsletter that discusses this bug and another solution if you really need to use tracking for wildcard replacements. I’ve dealt with Jack on many occasions and he’s always been helpful. I can wholeheartedly recommend his macro packages as well; he gives great support. (Usual disclaimers here; just a very happy customer!)

4

Thanks Scarlett67! It’s funny, but Editorium is where I found out it’s a bug. It was my first time there, but it’s been bookmarked and I’m slowly reading my way through it — it’s fantastic!

I was tempted by his software, but now with your recommendation I’ll be downloading it and trying it out over the weekend.

Thanks!!!