Word: Find and highlight words of two or more capitals

I previously wrote about using wildcards in Word to find abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms that used two or more capital letters, but that post didn’t address how to highlight these so that you can identify them easily when compiling a list of abbreviations. This one does.

1. Make sure you have a highlight colour selected (Home tab, Font group) that isn’t used for anything else.
2. Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace window.
3. Click More to show further options.
4. Select the Use wildcards checkbox.
5. In the Find what field, type: (<[A-Z]{2,}>)
6. In the Replace with field, type:  \1
7. With your cursor still in the Replace with field, click Format (bottom of the window) then Highlight. The word ‘Highlight’ should display immediately below the Replace with field.
8. Click Find next to find the first string of two or more capitals.
9. If this is an acronym, abbreviation, or initialism, click Replace. The term remains the same but should now be highlighted in the colour you chose in Step 1.
10. Repeats Steps 8 and 9 to jump to and/or highlight the next string of two or more caps.
11. Optional but not recommended: If you are confident that the only strings of capital letters in your document are acronyms etc., then click Replace All. Note: Every string of capitals will be highlighted, even those that are repeats of ones you highlighted earlier and those that aren’t acronyms etc. (e.g. document numbers, fully capped words).

How this works:

• The opening and closing parentheses contain the Find command and allow you to reference it in the Replace.
• The opening and closing arrow brackets (< and >) specify that you want a single whole word, not parts of a word. Without these, you would find each set of caps (e.g. in the string ABCDEF, you would find ABCDEF, then BCDEF, then CDEF, then DEF, then EF, before moving on to the next set of caps).
• [A-Z] specifies that you want a range (the [ ] part) of caps that fall somewhere in the alphabet (A-Z). If you only wanted capped words that started with, say, H through to M, then you’d change the range to [H-M] and all other capped words starting with other letters would be ignored.
• {2,} means you want to find capped words with at least two letters in the specified range (i.e. A-Z). If you only wanted to find two- and three-letter capped words, then you’d change this to {2,3}, and all capped word of four or more letters would be ignored. By not specifying a number after the comma, the ‘find’ will find capped words of any length containing at least two letters.
• The \1 in the Replace and ‘Highlight’ below that field tells Word to replace what was found with itself, and to highlight it with the selected highlight colour.

Note: This technique does NOT find initialisms separated by periods or any other punctuation; it will find UNICEF but not U.N.I.C.E.F.

 

Generate BAS data using a MYOB (v19) report

This post is for me, in case anything gets messed up in the future, like it did today. I use MYOB AccountRight Plus v19, so if you use a different version, this may not work for you.

What happened

I went to generate my quarterly BAS using the BASLink method I’ve used since I started using MYOB. But instead of getting all the fields filled with figures, I got nothing. Blank fields everywhere. Something wasn’t right. After panicking a bit (being late with a tax office payment is not my idea of a good time!), I remembered that I got a new computer back in August. Aha! I bet something didn’t link as it should. Now all this is just a few short sentences, but it was about an hour of time, and about 10 years off my life!

What I did

I emailed my accountant to see if she could help, and while I was waiting for a response, I hunted out old backup files looking for the *.bas files for the BASLink setup. I found them but nothing I did worked—I still got blank fields in my BAS. Then I found this web page, which gave me the clue I’d been looking for: https://help.myob.com/wiki/display/ar/BASlink+FAQs

I’d been looking for a way to link the setup files via MYOB itself, but you have to do it via BASLink, which means running BASLink, ignoring all the blank fields and going to File > Setup & Links WITHIN the BASLink program. Once I’d correctly linked the old files, everything worked, and I breathed a very large sigh of relief.

An alternative

Meantime, my accountant got back to me just as I’d solved the problem telling me that there’s another way to generate the BAS data via standard MYOB reports, so here are those steps if I ever need them in the future:

1. Go to Reports > GST/Sales Tax.
2. Select the GST [Summary – Cash] report.
3. Click Customise and set the dates for the quarter.
4. While in the Customise window, also select the tax codes to report (in my case, just GST).
5. Click Display. This gives you the totals that go into the various fields on the BAS:
   • Sale value = G1
   • Purchase value = G11
   • Tax collected = 1A
   • Tax paid = 1B
6. What it doesn’t give is the PAYG tax information, so for that go to Reports > Payroll.
7. Select the Activity Summary report under Employees.
8. Click Customise and set the dates for the quarter, if not already set.
9. Leave Employees set to All.
10. Click Display. This gives you the totals that go into the various fields on the BAS:
    • Wages = W1
    • Taxes = W2, W5, and 4.