That's the thing though, I don't want it to get rid of all the names in that example. Only on the lines where Suzy is talking. Plus, this is just an example.

Do you know any programming? You can throw something together pretty quickly if you know any. I'd probably use flex, but there are other options.

Also, find and replace in what, exactly? You don't really say, so it's kind of hard to tell you whether it would work or not. I'm also kind of unclear just exactly what you want to do. Do you want to remove *just* the name and quotes, so (Suzy: "Hi Michael!") becomes (Hi Michael!), or do you want to remove the entire block of text, i.e. everything Suzy speaks?

Anyway, if whatever you're using is doing generic find and replace, no, it won't do it. But that's why the gods gave us regexp, also to confuse us and make us cry. This one shouldn't be *too* complicated though, so you could probably manage it with a bit of tinkering.

You want groups:

(Suzy|Michael|annoyance)[:] ")([^"]+)"

The first group (bits inside the parentheses) should yield the name: " bit, and the next group should give you what they say. The last bit (which I didn't bother grouping), is simply the closing quote.
The [^"] formation says "anything except the ^ symbol". Putting a + sign after it says "Where is occurs 1 ore more times". Replace wtih * if you want 0 or more, so it will support lines like Johnny: "".

HTH.

I wish I could understand you Chris, but sadly I don't know enough programming to be able to pull this off by writing a script to do this for me.

@dan_gero I would pull that document up in notepad++ and then use the find and replace dialog there, switch the mode radio button to regular expression, and then copy in what he put in for post 7 in to the find box. In the replace box, use \2 which takes everything from the second large group of parentheses matched which in this case is the text after the first quote.

Update: I figured it out, and I'm gonna show you how I did this so nobody else will be confused.
For reference, let's bring back the above quote.

I used Notepad Plus Plus and switched the radio button to regular expressions, then I typed this into the find box.
Suzy: "(.*)"
I typed this into the replace box.
\1
Here's the end result.

This is exactly what I was looking to do, and now after my buddy showed me these commands I know how to do it so I'm happy. Hopefully this helped someone out.