Question

As per the question, trying to replace a span of text in a Word document that is of the form

"<start>..........<end>"

of variable length. It will only occur once in the document.

Answer 1

You can use Word’s built-in find/replace functionality to do this, eg

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
   .Text = "\<start\>*\<end\>"
   .Replacement.Text = ""
   .Forward = True
   .Format = False
   .MatchCase = False
   .MatchWholeWord = False
   .MatchWildcards = True
   .MatchSoundsLike = False
   .MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

This was found from simply recording a macro with Word 2007 and viewing the VBA code. The .Text property can use wildcards, such as * and [A-Z], similar to regular expressions referred to in @Jayantha’s response. The back-slashes are included in the .Text property because < and > are wildcard characters too, and the back-slash escapes them. Search for “replace” in the Word help files.