I have three issues with Microsoft Word 2003. Firstly, after upgrading Word 97 to Word 2003 the find function no longer works when using wildcards in the search criteria. For example, when I use a combination of letters and the ? wildcard to find a certain word, not every instance of the requested search pattern will be found. However, this works correctly in Word 97. Secondly, a document I am authoring has embedded graphics. These graphics display fine in ‘Normal’ view, but when I apply text-wrapping around the images the pictures are only visible through ‘Print Layout’ mode. Is it possible to force the text-wrapped graphics to appear in ‘Normal’ view? Finally, I do a lot of cutting-and-pasting in Word 2003 and find the clipboard icon (which appears whenever pasting text) is a real nuisance, as it appears over-the-top of the text below the newly pasted text. Can I disable the clipboard icon from appearing? The computer is running Windows XP Professional.

Word 2003 uses a different wildcard search syntax to Word 97. If you wish to do a wildcard search (for any character) in Word 97 you need to use the ? wildcard syntax. However, in Word 2003 you must use the ^? syntax. For example, the search query:
h^?t
would find the following terms: ‘hit’, ‘hat’, ‘hot’. If you use the search query h?t in Word 2003, it will find none of those terms. This could explain why all the terms are not found when searching in Word 2003, as you are using the old syntax. An entire list of Word 2003 wildcard search syntaxes can be found by opening the ‘Find’ window, selecting the ‘Find’ tab, clicking on the ‘More’ button (to display the advanced find options), and then click the ‘Special’ button. A list of all the special search criteria will appear. If you select one of these criteria, you will see the search syntax appear in the ‘Find what’ box. For example, the syntax for ‘Graphic’ is ^g and the syntax for the wildcard ‘Any letter’ is ^$. You can use multiple special search criteria/wildcards in the one find query.

Regarding your second query, this is the normal behaviour of Word. Before starting, we need to define the difference between Normal mode and Print Layout mode. Normal mode is designed to be simple and just display the text of a document, plus other objects which are displayed ‘inline’ with the text (i.e. sit on the same lines as text). In contrast, Print Layout mode displays the page with all objects, to demonstrate how the page will look when printed. When you insert a graphic in ‘View’ menu > ‘Normal’ mode, the graphic (by default) inserts ‘Inline’, meaning it is treated just like a line of text, ’sitting’ on the same lines as the text. Text can be typed before and after the graphic and the graphic is treated just like a block of text itself. When the graphic is inline, it can be displayed in Normal mode because it is sitting on the same lines as the text. However, when you change the layout mode to ‘Square’ (or another non-inline layout) the graphic is no longer sitting on the same line as the text, but instead is ‘floating’ about the page and can be moved to any position and the text flows around the image. Therefore, the image cannot be displayed in ‘Normal’ mode, but instead is only visible in Print Layout mode. The only way around this issue is to set the graphics to display as ‘In line with text’. You can change the layout mode by right-clicking on the image, select ‘Format picture’ > click the ‘Layout’ tab and choose the ‘wrapping style’. However, this is likely to change a lot of formatting in the document. I would recommend you just look at the document through Print Layout mode.

Finally, you will be glad to hear you can disable the clipboard icon that appears when pasting text in Word 2003. Open Word and go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Options’. In the window that appears, click the ‘Edit’ tab. Under the ‘Cut and paste options’ heading, untick the option ‘Show Paste Options buttons’ and click OK.