How to find all the capitalized words in a Word document

I recently edited a long document whose original author capitalized words rather liberally. To speed up the process, I needed an automated way to locate each of these words so I could make a decision whether the capitalization was appropriate.

It’s easier than it sounds.

In Word, do an advanced search (Word 2010; a plain search will do in 2007 and earlier), click the “More” button, check the box labeled Use wildcards, and enter this regular expression:

<[A-Z][a-z]{2,}>

This expression searches for any capital letter followed by two or more lowercase letters. You can then cycle through one at a time, or use the Reading Highlight button to just highlight them.

This saved me a lot of time. The document had several problems, and I found it helpful to zero in on one problem at a time and fix that, in order to keep from getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of problems and pages.

This can also be useful for finding words that are appropriate to include in a glossary or index.