Expert: Suzanne S. Barnhill - 10/31/2009

Question
QUESTION: I want to replace all instances of Proper noun in a word document (i.e. Names starting with Capital Letter) to Bold. Can you please provide me a solution asap.

ANSWER: You can certainly find all words that begin with a capital letter and format them as bold, but this will not guarantee that they are proper nouns, as you would also find words that begin a sentence. To find all words beginning with a capital, click More to expand the Replace dialog and check the box for "Use wildcards." Then search for:

<[A-Z]*>

Leave the "Replace with" box blank or put ^& in it (it won't make any difference) and press Ctrl+B to make it say Format: Font: Bold. Replace All.

Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word) 1999-2009

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Suzanne,

Thanks for your reply, however, my question is still there.
As per your search criteria, it will only search CAPITAL LETTERS, whereas I would like to search the words beginning with Capital letter eg. 'Financial Services', then it should be formatted as Bold by the replacement command. It means that it will search 'Financial' and make it Bold, then it will search  'Services' and make it Bold and so on. I too came out with a solution for the problem and it worked, but I have to search & replace them one by one. Which is why I was looking for a better advise from some experts. Please help if there is any way out.

My search criteria:
Find:
[A-Z]{1,100}[a-z]{1,100}
Use Wildcards

Replace:
Font: Bold

Answer
The syntax I gave you will find all words beginning with a capital letter, whether the rest of the letters are capitalized or lowercase. If you use it exactly as I typed it:

<[A-Z]*>

I think you will find it works. The angle brackets represent the beginning and end of a word, and the asterisk represents any number of characters following the capital letter.

Yours will also work but is needlessly complex. It is not necessary to search one by one to boldface all such words, but it is necessary if you want to omit words that are just the first word in a sentence, and I don't see any way around that.

Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word) 1999-2009