Office 2013 offers robust regular expression matching, that will be very handy to do some basic stuff. One example, I was recently given a 10 page document to edit and incorporate citations. They wanted me to look for the authors (citations) within the text and add correct reference in the “references” section. One problem: there were way too many citations! It was hard for me to distinguish authors and normal text. I decided to highlight all the authors using regular expressions. This is how I did it:
Here the first "\" is escape character, this tells Word to treat the next character "(", as-is i.e., find a opening parenthesis in the document. Next, "(*)" tells Word to find one or more words after the opening parenthesis, and finally "\)" the search pattern ends when it encounters closing parenthesis (requires an escape character). So basically it matches anything within the parenthesis.
Note that you need to have "Use wildcards" checked. For the next part (to highlight), simply click on "Format" button and select "Highlight". When done, just click on "Replace All". You will have all the text in the document, within the parenthesis, highlighted! You can change "\(" and "\)" to other things as well. For eg., "\{" and "\}" for text within the curly braces, so on.