Thank you for your comments.
Now Christmas is over I am returning to my problem of getting wingding characters to replace existing
single characters or strings in Word documeents.
I liked using the Perl lines

$search-> {Text} = $oldtext;
$replace-> {Text} = $newtext;
$search-> Execute({Replace => wdReplaceAll});
[download]

since these seem to preserve the font (and all other characteristics) of the characters that are identical to whatever is in $oldtext.
I also am comfortable with using definitions of the old text such as "\x{00BD}".
The problem comes with any characters using from wingdings. As a test I created a Word document that contained a ‘pencil’ pointing from top right to bottom left.
This has a hex value of 0021. I then used the following three lines of Perl hoping to get the next wingding characters (scissors)

$search-> {Text} = "\x{0021}";
$replace-> {Text} ="\x{0022}";
$exec_res = $search-> Execute({Replace => wdReplaceAll});
[download]

$exec_res returned a value of 0 and the replacement had failed.
How can I overcome this failure?