Find & Replace Stripping Formatting

**Jbm444** · 08-04-2010, 11:06 AM

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.

**Cheeky Charlie** · 08-04-2010, 01:14 PM

I started to write 'I don't think this is possible', then I tried something, which worked...

Copy-paste the table into word, F&R, copy-paste back (or leave it in word, if you're writing essays...)

ho ho ho it's magic

**Jbm444** · 08-04-2010, 02:03 PM

Okay, here are the steps I've taken:
1) Inserted a table of 1208 rows, 1 column in Word
2) Copy Column G (which has 1208 rows) from Excel, paste it into the Word table
3) Find and replace, replaced [ with 0000 and ] with 0000 (I'll explain in a second)
4) Activated "use wildcards" and replaced 0000*0000 with blank (brackets are wildcards, so they had to be replaced with something beforehand)
5) This is where I need help. The text is now in the format I need it, but I'm having trouble getting it back into the excel table. Any suggestions would be welcome.