Hey,
I googled this + searched old posts on this site, but despite that I'm sure this question has been asked before, I can't tailor my query correctly to find the answer. So, apologies if this is redundant.
I have over 1200 rows of data, columns A-G. Column G is what concerns this question. Despite Excel not being built for it, I have very large strings of text in every cell. There are specific words I have bolded in each cell, and they need to stay bolded.
I need to delete any instances of "[*]" and so I used find & replace all, replacing the string[*] with a blank.
This seemed to work perfectly, and other methods don't seem to work because there are not always spaces between the brackets and what surrounds them

i.e.
I went to the market the other day[blind25]. [notblind] John went to the hairdresser today[25]
becomes...
I went to the market the other day. John went to the hairdresser today

Sometimes there are spaces, sometimes there are not.
In any case, find & replace does what I want, but it strips the bolding from all the words that were previously bolded (in the above example, "John" needs to remain bold). Because I'm working with 1200 cells, it is not an option to re-bold everything that needs to be, so: how do I find & replace (or just delete those strings of[*]) without stripping the formatting? Thanks for any and all help.