Yes, you can edit any glossary ...

Hi, DeniH - I have done global find/replace in many glossaries over the years - maybe hundreds of times! If you know for a fact that Every. Single. Hyphen. in the TIME glossary is eligible for replacement, then you could do a global find/replace to replace all hyphens with "{Ctrl -}, and it should work fine.

Before I replace anything "behind the scenes," as I refer to it (e.g., editing the raw data directly), I always, always, always make a backup copy of the glossary for safekeeping. If it's a super-simple F/R process, such as this one, I'll just do it right there in Notepad when the glossary opens (after double-clicking on it). But sometimes I want to do a multi-step process, or maybe replace most but not all of something, or use the wildcard feature. In that case, I'll paste the text into a Word doc, do the replacements there, then paste it back into the Notepad doc and save it.

I've also just grabbed a portion of a glossary to do a find/replace and dumped that into Word. Sometimes I might have, say, a hundred or so entries in a massive glossary that I want to either replace just those entries, or maybe I want to use those entries as a base to create some new entries for that same glossary. So I'll copy that chunk into a Word doc, make the changes, then copy it back into the Notepad doc. Works like a charm!

When copying it into a Word doc, it can be harder to follow the entries because the copied text is going to conform to whatever formatting you have going on in the blank Word doc. To make it easier to visually digest the text, I created a template (an ACTUAL .dotm template, not a "doc as a template") that I named "Instant Text Glossary Modifications."

I modified the Normal style in the template to the following settings:
Font: Calibri Light 9pt
Single spacing
0" indents all around
9pt spacing after each paragraph
Margins .17" top, bottom; .2" left, right
Landscape mode

Another tip: When I'm doing a F/R in Word, I always add the highlight function to the replacement text. This makes it super-easy to eyeball and double-check what actually got replaced and that the replaced text looks exactly like you want it to look before copying it back into the glossary.

One more tip: I always make sure I'm closed out of Instant Text before making any changes to a glossary, even if the glossary I want to change is not currently active.

Lastly but no less important: When copying the glossary text into a Word doc, I only ever grab the text between the , tags (not the tags, just the text between them), to ensure that I don't accidentally replace anything in the uppermost and bottommost portion of the glossary, which could mess it up.

I hope this all makes sense, and I hope it helps!

Karen S. :)