I have not tested the other office products, but at least in Word, the find
and replace wildcards are very powerful but are missing a detail that would
make certain tasks much easier: the ability to say that the previous
character or expression can match zero or more times. very often I need to
run the same replacement multiple times just to catch cases where extra
spaces can appear or not, etc. and if I do so in the wrong order it can be
messy. An alternative would be a new character that would mean 'match the
previous character or expression zero or one times' and that could be
combined with the "@" or "{}" characters.

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