Hi Taz,

I don't have any trouble locating tab characters either, using ^t.

The trouble was in trying to locate text that has a particular tab stop in
its paragraph formatting, whether or not there's a tab character leading to
that tab stop. This involves clicking the Format button in the Find dialog,
selecting Tab, and entering the kind of tab stop you want to find. Last
night on my home PC it wouldn't find any text with, for instance, a 2"
left-aligned tab stop even though the document does contain text like that.
Today on my work PC, it finds it with no problem. Now I don't know what's
going on... more results later.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

CyberTaz wrote:
Hi Jay-

FWIW, I've found no problem locating default or custom tabs with the
^t (Word 2003 or 2002) _unless_ the tab is the result of Bullets &
Numbering. It does, oddly enough, find tabs in a TOC.

Regards |:)

"Jay Freedman" wrote:

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 01:21:25 -0000, "Geoff" wrote:
[snip]
Incidentally, how would I search for a tab character? The
Format button in the Replace dialog seems only to permit
searching for a tab stop (but then the search fails to find
anything). Also, Ctrl-Tab doesn't enter a tab character.

Thanks again for the leads. I thought you might like to know
where they took me.

Geoff

I'll let Shauna answer the important part of your question, since she
knows a lot more than I about numbering and styles.

Regarding the Replace dialog, it will search for a tab character if
you put the code ^t in the Find What box. If you don't remember the
code, click the More button, then the Special button, and select Tab
Character from the list.

When I used the Format button and selected Tab to define a tab stop
to search for, it didn't find the tab stops in the document. I think
that's a bug. However, I was able to do it with a macro like this:

Sub FindTabStop()
Dim oRg As Range

Set oRg = ActiveDocument.Range
With oRg.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Text = ""
.ParagraphFormat.TabStops.Add _
Position:=InchesToPoints(2), _
Alignment:=wdAlignTabLeft
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchWildcards = False
If .Execute Then
oRg.Select
End If
End With
End Sub

The macro recorder won't correctly create this kind of macro.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org