Word Mac shows dozens of ¬ "logical not" characters for hard-hyphen, but Find command says "No matches"

Question

Word Mac shows dozens of ¬ "logical not" characters for hard-hyphen, but Find command says "No matches"

Arden Ogg 0

I am using Word Mac Office Home & Business 2024. Please let me know if this is the wrong forum.

At some point, all non-breaking hyphens in my 200-page document changed in appearance to ¬ (logical not). I need to change all of them back to regular hyphens using find and replace, however when I attempt to search, Word Mac says "No matches".

I have copied the character to the find box in advanced find: "No matches"
I have selected the non-breaking hyphen from the special characters pull down in Find: "No matches"
I have tried the Unicode value in Find (u+00ac): "No matches"
I have tried the various suggested shortcuts for typing hard hyphen (the most common one seems to trigger superscript instead)
In print preview, they are replaced (incorrectly) with spaces.
Saved to PDF, the ¬ is deleted entirely.
In Libre Office, the ¬ is deleted entirely.

I'd be grateful for some help here!

Here's what I see on screen.

Screenshot 2026-03-31 at 10.43.58 AM

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2 answers

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Answer 1

Marcin Policht 86,455 MVP Volunteer Moderator

Try using internal search codes. In Word Mac Open Find and Replace, expand to “Advanced,” and in Find, use:

^~

This is Word’s special code for a non-breaking hyphen. In Replace, put a normal hyphen:

Then Replace All.

If ^~ doesn’t work:

Try using the Unicode code for non-breaking hyphen: ^u2011 in the Find box and - in Replace.
Make sure Use wildcards is off, because wildcards change how Word interprets codes.
Also check your font: sometimes display issues make it appear as ¬, but the replacement will work regardless.

If that still fails, try using a macro to scan the document and replace any character with the Unicode property “Hyphen” (or anything visually resembling a hyphen) with -.

If the above response helps answer your question, remember to "Accept Answer" so that others in the community facing similar issues can easily find the solution. Your contribution is highly appreciated.

hth

Marcin

Arden Ogg 0 Reputation points

2026-03-31T16:35:22.99+00:00

Thank you: Wild cards now turned off.
^~ finds the ¬ (not signs) I've replaced with hard hyphen by hand.
^u2011 yields "Word found no items matching this criteria"
Multiple font changes show only minor variation of ¬.
A newbie at macros, but I'll give it a shot.
Marcin Policht 86,455 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2026-03-31T17:00:57.57+00:00
That behavior seems to confirm the characters are no longer true non-breaking hyphens in the document model. They’re likely corrupted or substituted glyphs that only render as ¬, which is why ^~ only finds the ones you manually fixed and ^u2011 finds nothing. Word is not seeing them as hyphens at all anymore, so normal Find won’t work.

At this point, you might want to consider bypassing Word’s “special character” logic and operate at the character code level with a macro. This lets you inspect each character and replace anything that resolves to the logical-not code (172) or anything outside expected hyphen ranges.

In Word Mac, press Option+F11 to open the VBA editor, insert a new module, and run this:

Sub FixCorruptHyphens() Dim rng As Range Dim i As Long Dim ch As String Set rng = ActiveDocument.Content For i = rng.Characters.Count To 1 Step -1 ch = rng.Characters(i).Text ' Replace logical NOT (¬, ASCII 172) If AscW(ch) = 172 Then rng.Characters(i).Text = "-" End If ' Also catch stray non-breaking hyphen if present If AscW(ch) = 8209 Then rng.Characters(i).Text = "-" End If Next i End Sub

Run the macro and it will sweep the entire document, replacing every character with code 172 (¬) and 8209 (non-breaking hyphen) with a standard hyphen.

If you want to verify what those characters actually are before replacing, you can temporarily use this diagnostic macro:

Sub InspectCharacter() MsgBox AscW(Selection.Text) End Sub

Place the cursor on one of the ¬ symbols and run it. If it returns 172, that confirms the corruption path.

The reason this happened is usually a bad font substitution, encoding shift during copy/paste, or a document that passed through another system that remapped U+2011 incorrectly. Once the characters have been converted to 172 internally, Word no longer treats them as hyphens, which is why all built-in search codes fail.

If the above response helps answer your question, remember to "Accept Answer" so that others in the community facing similar issues can easily find the solution. Your contribution is highly appreciated.

hth

Marcin
Arden Ogg 0 Reputation points

2026-03-31T17:04:56.8366667+00:00

Thank you. This looks very elegant. I'll report back once I've given it a go.
Arden Ogg 0 Reputation points

2026-03-31T20:08:55.0433333+00:00

Many thanks. This was amazing.

I tried your first macro, but yielded only a spinning beachball (which may well have been due to some blunder of mine).

After a force quit, I tried your diagnostic macro. It identified the character as 31 - which appears as "Unit Separator" in the ASCII table. I searched the ASCII string ^31 (in advanced F&R), and was able to replace the whole lot of them with plain hyphen in one go.

Your help has been brilliant. Thank you so very much!
Marcin Policht 86,455 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2026-03-31T20:37:13.47+00:00

you're welcome.

If the above response helps answer your question, remember to "Accept Answer" so that others in the community facing similar issues can easily find the solution. Your contribution is highly appreciated.

hth

Marcin

Answer 2

Arden Ogg 0

Again, many thanks.

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Word Mac shows dozens of ¬ "logical not" characters for hard-hyphen, but Find command says "No matches"

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