How to Use the Wildcard Find & Replace Check in PerfectIt
There's a particular flavour of regret that comes from spending twenty minutes perfecting a wildcard string, using it once, and then closing Word.
Next month the same problem turns up in a different document and you're building it again from scratch, because you can't quite remember whether you used @ or {1,} and you definitely can't remember why.
PerfectIt's Wildcard Find & Replace check exists to end that. You write the string once, save it into a style sheet, and it runs on every document you check from then on, with each hit shown in context so you decide, one by one, whether to accept it.
This walkthrough assumes you know your way around PerfectIt generally, but not this check specifically.
Where it lives
Go to Edit Current Style on the PerfectIt tab in Word, then choose the Wildcards tab in the editor window.
The layout will look familiar; it's much like the Always Find tab. One thing catches almost everybody out on their first attempt: even though Wildcard Find & Replace is the only kind of check available on this tab, you still have to select it from the All Checks dropdown at the top. If the Add button won't respond, that's why.
Adding your first check
The two text fields work exactly like Word's. "PerfectIt should warn if it finds the phrase" is your Find What; "If it finds the phrase, it should suggest" is your Replace With.
There's also a Special Character dropdown, which pulls from the same list as Word's Ctrl+H dialogue. This is useful for the caret codes you can't type directly, and a decent memory jog when you can't recall which symbol is which.
Let's add something simple, hyphenating words that start with re followed by another e:
Find: <([Rr])e(e[a-z]@)>
Replace: \1e-\2
That catches reevaluate, Reelect, and reexamine, turning them into re-evaluate, Re-elect and, re-examine. The [Rr] inventory means the capital survives, which is worth doing because wildcard checks in PerfectIt are always case-sensitive, exactly like wildcard searches in Word.
The Find string goes in the top box, the Replace string in the bottom, then click Add.
The two columns people ignore
Once the check is added, you'll see Instructions and Description columns to the right.
Instructions works as it does everywhere in PerfectIt; a note to whoever runs the style, explaining what the rule is and why.
Description is invisible to anyone just running PerfectIt. It's a note to yourself, for when you come back in six months wondering what on earth this string does.
And here's a trick worth adopting from day one. Because nobody else sees the Description field, you can fill it with your own keywords, tagged with a character that marks them as keywords rather than prose, something like $prefix and $hyphen. The style editor has a search box they can use at the bottom left. Type $hyphen, dollar sign and all, and you've filtered your entire wildcard library down to every hyphenation check you've ever written.
Once you have thirty or forty wildcard checks in a style, you start curating a library rather than a toppled over pile.
Running it
Before anything else, check that Wildcard Find & Replace is enabled under Choose Checks. It's on by default, and it lives in the Spelling Consistency group, between Similar Words and Preferred Spelling. If you switched it off during less enlightened times, now's the moment.
Then press Start. PerfectIt works through Hyphenation and Dashes, then Similar Words, then arrives at your wildcard check and presents the hits.
From there it's the standard PerfectIt experience: Fix each one individually or Fix All if you can see the hits are all genuine. And Undo puts everything back if you get enthusiastically click-happy and regret it.
That is a significant difference from using Word alone. In Word, Replace All is a leap of faith. In PerfectIt you see each hit in context first, which means the strings you'd never quite dare run across a whole document become perfectly safe to use.
When to reach for it
The general answer is: whenever you'd use wildcards in Word. PerfectIt is using Word's own wildcard engine underneath.
But there are cases where the wildcard check is the right tool even when you wouldn't have bothered in Word.
Capitalisation in context
PerfectIt's Preferred Spelling check can mark the replacement as case-sensitive, but not the thing being found. Suppose your style prefers Ms over Mrs and Miss. Mrs is easy; it's never anything but a title. Miss is not, because searching for it also finds miss, and you'll be swamped with false positives. A wildcard check is always case-sensitive, so it solves this even with no wildcard symbols in it at all:
Find: Miss
Replace: Ms
That's a perfectly legitimate wildcard check. It simply will not find miss.
Anything that start with a symbol
Preferred Spelling handles a straight swap like degrees to °, but adding a symbol to the front of a word is a job for the wildcard check.
Replacing part of a word
Other checks tend to work on whole words. Wildcards let you get at prefixes, suffixes, and fragments.
One tip on organising all this. If your style handles Mrs to Ms as a Preferred Spelling check and Miss to Ms as a wildcard check, users will meet the same issue twice at different points in the run. It's often kinder to put the straightforward one into the wildcard tab too, just so everything of a kind appears together.
Get the Full Guide for Free
Brave New Word is our free ebook on Wildcard Find & Replace in Word and PerfectIt, by our in-house linguist Chris Ryder. As well as the complete symbol set and dozens of worked examples across medical, legal, technical, proposal and academic writing, it has two full chapters on PerfectIt, including exception rules, how the wildcard check interacts with every other check in the run, and the traps to avoid when several checks want to touch the same text. There's also a printable cheat sheet at the back.