Find/Change Not Finding Manual Bullets from Word File

[jay fresno]

I'm using InDesign CC 2019. release 14.0.

I have text imported from MS Word that includes a bulleted list. When importing I chose to remove styles and formatting from text and tables.

I tried to use Find/Change to remove the bullet and tab character left over from the Word text and replace it with the Bulleted List paragraph style that was already created in the InDesign document. Find/Change did not remove the Word bullet and tab but it did apply the Bulleted List paragraph style. That resulted in two sets of bullets: one set from MS Word and one from the InDesign paragraph style.

If I use Find/Change to remove the bullet and tab left over from Word and do not apply the InDesign Bulleted List paragraph style in the Find/Change dialog, InDesign removes the Word bullet and tab. Then I need to do a second step of applying the InDesign Bulleted List paragraph style.

Is this a bug in release 14.0 that I can't remove bullet tab and apply a paragraph style using Find/Change?

[jane-e]

Can you show your Find/Change dialog box?

[jay fresno]

[FRIdNGE · Accepted solution]

E.g. Bullet • followed by one or more spaces (could be a tab):

Find: ^•\h*(\H)

Replace by:  $1

Replace by format: "NewBullet" para style

[jay fresno]

This works. But why doesn't the simpler TEXT search and replace work?

[jane-e]

In the Search area, you have “Selected”. What is selected, and does it work if you change it to story or document?

[jay fresno]

The text that I want to search/replace is selected. I've tried them all -- story, document, etc -- none of them work correctly. They all do what I described in my originkal post.

[jane-e]

Michel's method is looking for any space. But since you are wonder why yours did not work, the next thing to look at, is did the Microsoft Word file actually have a tab.

Highlight the bullet and space in InDesign. Copy. Paste into the Find field (Text tab). InDesign is smart enough to paste codes where it needs to, which is a feature that I love.

If you are not worried about it, though, just use Michel's code, and save it as a query for re-use.

You could also double-check the paragraph style. Try removing that since you have a selection. And confirm that you don't have an extra space in the Find field. That would make it not work.

[jay fresno]

I appreciate you trying to help, but none of that is working. The MS Word file actually has a tab. Copying and pasting the bullet tab into the Find does not make any difference. No extra spaces in the Find field.

[jane-e]

What about removing the Paragraph style as a test?

[barbara_a]

This is one of the "lovable" quirks of InDesign. It won't remove the manually typed characters and apply a paragraph style at the same time. You'll need to run Find/Change twice. Once to apply the paragraph style and a second time to remove the extra bullet tab characters that were manually typed.