Searching for proximate terms

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Guest

Can the search function of Word be adapted in such a way that one can search
for a word or phrase that is within a certain proximity of another word or
phrase?
Thanks
 
Only in a limited sense. If you check 'Use wildcards' you can search for
expressions like

quick?{a,b}fox

to find 'quick' and 'fox' with at least a and not more than b intervening
characters.
 
Thanks for your reply. It is an interesting feature, I didn't know about,
but it doesn't seem to work well. I clicked on the "use wildcards" and then
in the search field, typed, "human?{1,20}psychology." Word then highlighted a
block of text that began with the word "human" and "five pages later," ended
ith "psychology."

Do you know why? That limits the usefulness of this feature.

Bob
 
Not sure why: the 20 intervening characters can be *any* characters,
including paragraph marks -- but that suggests that your pages have very
little on them. Sadly, Microsoft (as is their wont), rather than following
the well-established regular expression standard for the wildcard function,
chose to develop their own cludged-up and incompetent version. Apart from
being non-standard, as you observe, it just doesn't work very well.
 
Yes, I agree. I think what you indicaed is about as good as it gets, but I've
found the search capabilities such as those found in Lexis-nexis much better
and I've wanted to see that in MS Word. Oftentimes, the program has features
I don't know. I try to find it first and when I can't I may pose a question
like this one. Thanks again. In a pinch, what you indicated may help. Maybe,
the developers will take not of our conversation and add this as a feature in
the future.
All the best,
Bob
 
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