Wordiscover Examples

Utilizing The Full Functionality

Overview

On this page, you will learn about the full functionality of Wordiscover, and maybe even pick up some new tips and tricks on how to search your document!

Tips

  1. Spaces are taken literally! So when you utilize some of the special characters outlined below, Wordiscover will search for the space you entered too!

Or

This is the first example because it was the basis for the whole project! My wife asked how she could search for multiple authors in the citations of a 400+ page document. I thought that surely Microsoft had the very simple 'Or' functionality baked into their product - but no!

So here's the secret sauce: use the "pipe" character! Hold Shift and press the '\' (backslash) key to produce this character.

Boundary

Specifically here, we are talking about word boundaries. By that we mean you want to search for the word "lore" but not "implore" or "lorem" or any other word that contains the word. Why would you use this instead of a simple "space" before or after the word? Well, if your word is at the end of a sentence or next to closing parentheses then your search would miss the word since it's looking for a space character!

So here's the secret sauce: use a word boundary! Enter '\b' before the word to create a word boundary before, and/or '\b' after to create a word boundary after. Remember, don't put spaces before/after your word. Butt them up right against the '\b'!

Replace

The standard replace functionality works as you would expect - any match that is currently selected is replaced with the text typed into the Replace textbox when one clicks "Replace." Clicking "Replace All" replaces all of the matches with the text supplied.

Wordiscover makes use of the much more interesting capturing groups! So, that means we can replace using the "$1, $2, ..." tokens! Take a look at the video below to see this functionality in action.

Proximity

Proximity search in Wordiscover is straightforward. Simply select the "Word proximity" checkbox, type in the proximity search term, and if you want to search adjoining paragraphs, make sure you select the "Paragraph proximity" checkbox. Wordiscover searches on a paragraph by paragraph basis, and so the "Paragraph proximity" checkbox joins these paragraphs together (behind the scenes, not in your actual document!) to accomplish the search.

Not in Proximity

Similar to the proximity search, but now you're searching for words that don't have the proximity term near it. Simply select the "Logical Not" checkbox to execute this search.