It depends. Try to use some more structure elements, like list item and so on. It might be, that your text is not in paragraph.

BTW, just for tagging you could use this \[[^]*?\]

Thank you Jerzy, it worked with list item

I tried the regular expression you suggested but i get this error

STEFANO DE ASTIS

That regular expression is incorrect because there is no closing square bracket.  This is what you wanted I think:

\[[^]]+?\]

Dear Paul

Thank you for the correction.

Hi Paul,

I am trying to set up the project with 100+ Excel files, excluding the text in square brackets. The regex you mentioned above works. However, I noticed that many instances of =* appear in the files (pretty much every other segment) adding significantly to the word count. Do you know what the problem may be and how to get rid of those?

Thank you in advance.

Olena Polissky 

I think it would be better to create a new thread for this for two reasons:

1. this one already has a verified answer so it's easy to miss your posts
2. you need to provide more context to what =* means.  So provide examples of what's in the excel file to start with for example.

Thank you, Paul. I was able to figure out the issue on my own.