Interesting. I had already replaced the "invizzzzible" text, i.e., the
stuff I could see but Find could not. But I saved prior drafts with the
unchanged text so for the heck of it I played around with the problem. I
was unable to see anything hidden using either Fields or the paragraph
button, which I always set to display anyway. I also went to Tools,
Options, View and saw that in the section Formatting marks the box for All
was checked. I also checked the other boxes but nothing turned up that I
could not already see.

I learned a while back (from Ms. Barnhill) that paragraph marks are not
always what they seem to be in Find/Find&Replace, especially if the document
was not originally created in Word. There are paragraph marks and then
there are paragraph marks. Evidently, even plain-looking text may not
always be what it appears to be, in a document created outside Word. In
this case, Find found around 90-95% of the occurences of the text it
searched for so maybe I should look on the bright side. Since the searched
items were numbered I was able to detect the ones it missed. On the other
hand if such items are not numbered . . . well, there's proof-reading.
Thanks!

"Klaus Linke" wrote in message
...
Hi Joe,

So I figure something bizarre was going on like invizzzible characters.

Very likely!

Ones that only some secret part of the computer can see.

Might have been fields (which can be shown with Alt+F9) or hidden text
(usually shows when you hit the ¶ button on the formatting toolbar).

You can also use "Tools Options View" to toggle the display of field
codes, hidden text, and other stuff.
Wildcard searches are more prone to be duped by the invisible stuff than
regular searches.

Regards,
Klaus