Italicise text between speech marks using advanced find and replace in MS Word

Estimated reading time at 200 wpm: 4 minutes

All of this post is my notes. It is not designed for ‘you’. I use advanced features of find and replace in MS Word. I write my notes like self-talk because I’ve noticed that in a few months’ time I may not remember every aspect of this.

Challenge

Recently I wanted to find an easy way of italicising text between quotation (speech) marks in a whole document. Normally what I would do, is select text between the speech marks and then press CTRL + I. Well, that becomes effortful when I have a large document with lots of quoted text. Because I can type pretty quickly my interviews are some verbatim, interspersed with descriptive content in reported speech.

For example when I type text would appear as follows =>

Mr Blogs said, “My appetite is good. I eat three balanced meals per day and I go to the gym 3 times per week.” He was able to enjoy his meals but was not gaining or losing weight. He said that, “I have a big interests in football. But I spend too much time on Facebook.”

I would need to turn from ‘My’ to ‘week‘ and ‘I’ to ‘Facebook‘ into italics. That involves a lot of mouse and keyboard work, when I have 3 pages of that sort of stuff. It is keyboard and mouse-work intensive – to manually select text and then do CTRL + I.

HowTo

This “*” – notice open and closed speech marks – in the ‘Advanced Find & Replace’ feature in MS Word (O365), will select every instance where text appears between those open and closed speech marks. Then it is easy to select formatting for the ‘Replace’ part of the operation.

Notably I use ‘Styles’ to add different kinds of emphasis to my text. Why? Because I have noticed that changing the style of paragraphs – as I do on occasions – will erase the italics I might have put in with CTRL + I. Using a style for emphasis within a style for a paragraph doesn’t remove the emphasis style.

Field testing

This week, I used the above across several documents: probably about 50 pages in total. It worked like a dream. Had I passed these documents to a secretary, it would have taken them about an hour of mouse and keyboard work. I did the changes in those 50 pages in like 5 min, using the above method.

Took 5 mins to recover from that idiot above.

Moving on – one might wonder why I don’t share these tips with secretaries. It is this simple: they don’t want to know, and if shown they’ll go “Oooo…you’re so clever..that’s clever” – but then revert to what they always did. Why? Because – I know these people – they really don’t want to change, don’t want to learn, and not interested in updating their skills.

Conclusion

Many people don’t know about ‘Advance find/replace’ features in MS Word. I’m obviously not ‘many people’.  Actually, most people – calling themselves ‘luddites’ and proud to be – only use less than 10% of the power of MS Word. That’s apparently fiiiinnnne, as mediocrity and ‘luddite-ism’ are worshiped in The Empire.

I’ve shown to myself that spending a few minutes learning new tricks can save a load of time and effort. Obviously, me being ‘not everybody’ will find time to learn new tricks. Compared to various metaphorical ‘old dogs’, I’m therefore a young dog.