Every so often I find that instead of wanting merely to search for a word or phrase in a document I want to do something more sophisticated like “delete all text between ‘name:’ and a post code (which is a five digit number) and make it bold”. Word doesn’t make this too easy. I notice that OpenOffice.org Writer (the open source Word equivalent) seems to have more options but it is difficult to grasp the syntax. Is there an easy to use Windows program (preferably free/open source or shareware) to do this?
Incidentally, I have decided to switch to OpenOffice.org for the time being and see if this is a decision I can live with. Already I am hoping that someone will implement a “count the number of words in this selection” feature (which Word has). On the other hand, it handles file format exchange with my much-beloved Psion Series 5mx rather better than Microsoft Word itself does.
I was looking forward to using “Issuezilla” to find out when or if the word count feature would ever get added but I have found using this issue reporting software almost impossible. *sigh.
