Every editor who uses Word wildcards ends up with a scratch file somewhere. A text document, a note in a project folder, occasionally a Post-it. It contains four or five strings that took ages to work out and now get pasted in whenever the same problem comes round again.

Adding PerfectIt wildcard checks to a style sheet is straightforward. Getting a style sheet full of them to behave as a coherent whole is a different skill.

You've built a string. You're rather proud of it, smiling even as you type. You press Find Next, and Word tells you there's a Pattern Match expression that's not valid. Your face falls, and a very slight panic begins to set in…

Wildcards are powerful, time-saving and, dare we say, a little bit fun. But this is a post about why a Word wildcard search can let you down.

Copy-ready Word wildcard examples for editors, covering dates, medical units, currency, and citations. Learn how to adapt and test each search safely.

Finding all mistakes in a document that fall into a particular pattern is useful. Being able to automatically fix them at the same time is transformative.

If you’re involved in editing long documents, you will likely recognize this scenario. You open a draft and find the same small problem repeated hundreds of times.

So much of life is about who’s in your set. Word’s wildcards are really no different. Most of us have a ‘crowd’ that we feel some sort of affinity with. Professional groups, special interests; type of food or music we like; and so on.

Working on a U.S. government publication? Use the GPO Style Manual to guide your editing and check the finished document for style inconsistencies.

Your anguished cry rings out in the middle of the night: “Why, oh why, did I accept this stupid freelance job?” You know the answer: The client offered you twice as much money as you’d ordinarily get for a job like this because the deadline is tight. But now that deadline is looming, and there’s still a lot of work ahead. If only you knew how to use wildcard find and replace!

[First of all, if you're working under a deadline, I recommend adding PerfectIt to MS Word to check for brackets and quotes left open (and much more), quickly.] Now, onto the topic at hand: How to find a parenthesis symbol ( in a wildcard search in Word.