Hi LEO and Mike, Thanks for your reply
Yes LEO, you are right, it is just as you described what I am after. I have
thought of what you proposed, but there are so many possibilities as a
definition of a 'whole word' - that is why I asked for help, to see if I
could find standard rules for defining WholeWords.
Thanks for your help
Tks, JS

"LEO@KCC" wrote in message
...
Hi John,

I do not think Excel has the functionality you require built-in. (Mike,
please note that John is talking about the replace "Whole Word" feature of
Word, not just a simple replace...). Excel can only replace part of a
string or a whole string, NOT a whole word within a string.

I am sure there are ways do this in VBA, but I cannot think of anything
short or straight forward at present.

How about this: When you specify the string to be searched, add a space
before and after the word, and the same for the replacing string. For
example in vba:
Cells.Replace " bbb ", " ZZ ", xlPart

This will work if you consider "a whole word" to be a word surrounded by a
single space in each side, but may not work for, say, words next to a full
stop or a comma. You can in that case customise the statement and add all
possible scenarios you can think of....

Cells.Replace " bbb ", " ZZ ", xlPart
Cells.Replace " bbb.", " ZZ.", xlPart
Cells.Replace ". bbb ", ". ZZ ", xlPart
etc.

Regards

Leo

"Mike H" wrote in message
...
John,

Excel has the functionality built in, check out Edit|Replace.

If you want to do it with a macro then try this:-

Sub sonic()
findstring = InputBox("Enter what to find")
replacestring = InputBox("Enter what to replace it with")
Cells.Replace What:=findstring, Replacement:=replacestring
End Sub

Mike

"John Svendsen" wrote:

Hi All:
I need to find & replace Whole Words in Excel 2003 - Word has this
option,
but not Excel.
I've been looking for code to do this in VBA but all I find are canned
programs/Add-ins.
Can someone please give me an idea of how to do this in VBA for Excel
2003?
TIA, JS