Word 2003 – The Find What text contains a Pattern Match expression which is not valid.

Today I was trying to clean up a Word document and I had a lot of items that were in the following format:

{Number:Number:Number}

So for example– {1:25:89} or {6:12:1}. 

At first I was just doing a search for a left curly brace, then I would take my cursor, highlight all of the offending text and hit delete.  It didn't take long before I determined that was going to be too tedious. 

Luckily, I noticed in the Find and Replace dialog, if I hit More>>> there was a Use wildcards option.  So I did a search on:

{%:%:%}

But I got an error:
The Find What text contains a Pattern Match expression which is not valid.

"Whoops," I thought and assumed it was ADO getting the best of me.  ADO's wildcard character is %.  So I revised my search:

{*:*:*}

Still, I was greeted with the same error.  The same with questions marks as my wildcard character and the same with just searching on {.

It turns out, Word's wildcard search is pretty much a regular expression search (it does appear to be missing some support like \d, \w, etc).  And just like regular expressions, Word uses the curly braces to define repeating patterns.  As a result my search was using a reserved character.  In the end, I just had to escape the braces with a backslash:

\{*:*:*\}

From there, I left the Replace with field blank and was able to use the Replace All button to purge all those items in one swoop.  Even with the initial confusion, it was well worth it!

Here's another article detailing some common search scenarios and their syntax:
http://www.bcentral.co.uk/technology/software/microsoft-word-search-replace-find-tutorial-clipboard.mspx