Word (Office 365): Search string longer than 255 characters

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Is there a way to get around the 255 character limitation in the Word “Find” function?

I’ve seen a couple of suggested macros elsewhere, but they don’t seem to work and I don’t have the VBA skills to create a macro to do this.

 

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255 is an important number in computing, because 255 = 2^8 – 1 (2 to the eighth power, minus 1). Here’s why:
* At the lowest and most basic level, a computer speaks in “binary”; that is, the only digits it can understand are 0 and 1. The two digits correspond to the “2” in the above formula.
* When the original IBM PC came out, it was an 8-bit machine. That “8” corresponds to the “8” in the above formula.
* When a computer is counting at the lowest level, it always starts with zero, not with one. That’s why there is a “- 1” in the above formula.

Having said all that, if the search algorithm is 8-bit (a possibility, if it hasn’t been modernized), the maximum number of characters it can search on is 255. Some things have not been modernized in order to maintain backward compatibility, and the Word search function might be one of those things. For decades, there have been a huge amount of things with 8-bit limitations in computing, so my guess is that the Word search function is one of those things.

An example of an 8-bit number would be an IP address. An IP address consists of four 8-bit numbers; hence, the highest possible IP address would be 255.255.255.255. (Well, the highest IP v.4 address).

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Kirsty

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I do not know how to surpass the 255 character limit in the Find box, but you can surpass the 255 character limit in the Replace box.  The replace code ^c will replace the text found with the contents of the clipboard.  The clipboard has no 255 character limit.  In fact, you can use this code to replace text with an image.

 

Drcard:))

HTH, Dana:))

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