Hi Charles,

>I know how to use CONTAINS when full text indexing is on but is there a way to find all records containing '[ISO]' in a varchar(1500) column without it?

You can use LIKE operator

VarcharColumn LIKE '[[]ISO]' 
-- or
VarcharColumn LIKE '\[ISO]' ESCAPE '\'

>
>And what would be the syntax equiv to STRTRAN(mycolumn,'[ISO]','') ?

and REPLACE() function here

REPLACE(yourcolumn,'[ISO]','')