What do you need to understand to pump the Find and Replace features in Microsoft Word to avoid wasting time and avoid tedious manual editing?
Replacing Formatting
Replacing Special Characters
How to Remove Something Completely
Quick Look at the Basics
Although your choices to Find and Replace text and special characters in Microsoft Word tend to be more robust versus the other members on the Office suite, basic fundamentals to get started are similar for each program.
Keyboard shortcuts to Find and Replace:
Find = [Ctrl] + F
Replace = [Ctrl] + H
Find or Replace commands are found within the Home tab > Editing group.
Once you open the dialog box to Find or Replace, let’s assume that you happen to be comfortable with basic principles to find or replace simple text. What else could you do to be a little more productive editing your documents?
Quick Tip: Save your documents before launching a Replace command because you will be making a lot of changes in the past.
Replace Formatting
Searching for and replacing installments of a particular font, font size or font style just matter of opening inside the Replace dialog box. Next, click on the More>> button to show a number of extra options, and after that choose the appropriate selection through the Format drop-down list, such as Font, Paragraph, and Tabs.
As a good example, imagine if you want to locate all occurrences of “important” and color them red? You could do a standard Find command, stopping every time the word is available to manually apply colour but you know there’s an easier way.
If you want to replace all from the instances of a unique word within the document having a formatted version of itself, the initial step is to simply type the word you would like to format in to the Find what text box.
Next, type exactly the same word in to the Replace with box and go through the Format button to make up a drop-down list. From this list, select Font and select the desired color for your replacement text (in this example, red). Then close the dialog. Notice the formatting choices displayed immediately below the words entry within the text boxes.
Now go through the Find Next, Replace or Replace All buttons depending on how you intend to control the final results.
You’re not tied to finding a certain word or phrase joined with formatting options – you may leave the Find what blank and just choose formatting attributes. For example, leaving Find what blank deciding on the italics formatting may find all text that is certainly italicized. Use this to restore unwanted formatting – one example is replacing all italics with bold or even a different font style instead.
Quick Tip: To continue having a new Find or Replace action, first pay off the previous formatting choices for every single text box entry having a simple go through the No Formatting button. This button is simply available if the formatting choices selected.