It might be worth learning how to use regular expressions as your search criteria instead. It may make your life a lot easier.
For example
100-G-01
101-G02
102.G.3
103-G.1
Find:
[0-9]+[.-]?[A-Z][.-]?[0-9]+
That string will 'find' all of those lines regardless of them using a dash, period, or none.
You can also add saved portions as part of a replace using () and $
Find:
([0-9]+)[.-]?([A-Z])[.-]?([0-9]+)
Replace:
$1-$2-$3
Will output:
100-G-01
101-G-02
102-G-3
103-G-1
Which can help clean all your data in an intelligent way.
Or in your example
100-A1
100.A2
100A3
101-A1
101.A2
102A1
Find:
100[.-]?A[0-9]+
Would only select the first 3 policies under 100 regardless of how the remainder is punctuated or which A1-3 it is.
https://cheatography.com/davechild/c...r-expressions/
A quick explaination:
[A-Z] Look for any letter character
[0-9] Looks for any numerical character
+ means for as many digits that fall within that criteria. So 10 or 1011100 are all still numerical
[A-Z0-9]+ would mean grab any combination of letters & numbers until you hit a different character.
[.-] means find a . or a -
? means optional so look for a . or - but also okay if there isn't one
( ) means save the result from this section
$1 means replace with the result from the first set of ( ) in the search criteria
If you want to get complex you can also include return characters to span multiple rows in your search criteria but that's a bit more advanced.