Extracting Acronyms

Have you ever needed to find all the acronyms in a document and pull them into a single list? Of course you have. Here’s a great way to speed up the process of finding all the acronyms using Microsoft Word’s Find feature and a few wildcards:

Copy the following "wildcard" string:

<[A-Z]{2,}>

1. Press Ctrl+F to launch the Find dialog box
2. Paste the wildcard string into the Find field
3. Click the "More" button at the lower left of the window to expand the dialog box
4. Make sure "Use wildcards" is selected
5. Click on the "Find in" button and choose "Main document

This will select all the acronyms in your document, as long as the acronyms are capitalized. Now you simply need to close the Find dialog box and copy (Ctrl+C) the selected acronyms and paste (Ctrl+P) them into a new document or an area in the current document where you would like your list of acronyms to be seen.

NOTE: This wildcard selection will pick up anything set in all-caps. So if you are setting any text to all capitals, that text will end up in your acronym list.