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About this lesson

Learn to quickly find a word or format and replace it with an alternative.

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Find Replace - Exercise.docx
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Quick reference

The Find/Replace Function

Quickly find words and replace them with other words or formats.

When to use

Rather than searching visually for certain words in a document, the Find function will highlight the words. Then you have the option to Replace them with other words or formats.

Instructions:

  1. Ctrl-F (for ‘Find’) will open the Navigation Pane to the “Results” portion and will appear on a panel on the left side of the Word screen:Graphical user interface, text, application Description automatically generated
  2. Another way to open Find/Replace is the Home Ribbon, Editing group which also activates the Navigation Pane:
  3. In the Search box, type the word or words to find, i.e. Word
    Notice all instances of that word are highlighted in the documentA picture containing text Description automatically generated
  4. Ctrl-H (for ‘Replace’) will open a dialog box with advanced tools. Replace a repetitive word with another or find/replace formatting using the “More” box on the bottom left

Graphical user interface, application, Teams Description automatically generated

  1. Fill in the ‘Find what’ and the ‘Replace with’ sections; use the buttons on the screen to move through the words individually or all at once with ‘Replace All’.
     
  2. Click “More>>” to replace with Font styles or colors
     
  3. If you replace too much and want to reverse it, simply click the UNDO button on the ribbon or press Ctrl-Z.
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  • 00:04 This lesson is all about find/replace,
  • 00:06 and you might be using this more than anything else in Microsoft Word.
  • 00:10 To be able to find a word, replace a word is fantastic.
  • 00:14 Well, where is it located?
  • 00:15 First of all, it is on the Home ribbon way over on the far,
  • 00:19 far right-hand side in Editing group.
  • 00:22 Hitting that drop-down, I have Find.
  • 00:24 The tooltip pops up and tells me Ctrl+F happens to be the universal code for
  • 00:29 finding any software ever used.
  • 00:31 Will be a great thing to memorize.
  • 00:33 And now, when I float my mouse on Replace, that code is Ctrl+H.
  • 00:38 Also worth memorizing, but it's your personal preference.
  • 00:41 Let's go ahead and click on the Find and see what happens.
  • 00:46 A Navigation pane popped up over on the left-hand side of our screen.
  • 00:49 It's finding every form of the word, and
  • 00:52 it's showing us the contextual parts of it.
  • 00:54 Now, in this case, I have T-H-E with a space bar.
  • 00:58 Let me backspace, let me get rid of that space bar and watch what happens.
  • 01:02 All of a sudden, it highlighted just the T-H-E in there.
  • 01:05 So that's a difference.
  • 01:07 If you want to find every possible T-H-E, don't put a space bar behind it.
  • 01:11 If you just want to find the word, the, put a space bar behind it, and
  • 01:15 there they appear on the screen.
  • 01:17 Now, take a look at the Navigation pane.
  • 01:20 Instead of me clicking to the next, and the next, and the next, I can go ahead and
  • 01:24 review in what context is it used.
  • 01:27 Yeah, this is the one I was looking for right here.
  • 01:30 Click, and it takes me exactly to that one and highlight it on the screen.
  • 01:35 All right, let's change this up a little bit.
  • 01:37 I'm going to go ahead and close the Navigation pane.
  • 01:40 Okay, now, we're going to go ahead and do the replace.
  • 01:42 We can go to Editing and hit Replace, but that's a long way to travel.
  • 01:46 If you've got it memorized, you can just start anywhere on your screen and
  • 01:51 press Ctrl+H.
  • 01:52 A dialog box pops up this time instead of the navigation pane.
  • 01:55 So it remembers the last thing I searched for.
  • 01:58 But I do want to search for Microsoft Word, and
  • 02:01 I want to replace it with Microsoft Word, and that doesn't make sense, right?
  • 02:06 But I want to change the format of it.
  • 02:08 So I want to find every instance of word, and
  • 02:11 I'm going to replace it with some colored font.
  • 02:14 So I'm going to click on the More button.
  • 02:16 Now, this box is about to get bigger, and
  • 02:18 we can see we have all these options in here.
  • 02:21 But take a look on the very bottom left,
  • 02:24 I can replace Formats characters, a Paragraph Mark with a space bar.
  • 02:29 On the Format, I'm going to go ahead and choose Font.
  • 02:33 In here, I want to replace Microsoft Word, make it bold italicized,
  • 02:38 and I'm going to change the font color to orange.
  • 02:41 And this is an example of what it will look like, and I'll go ahead and click OK.
  • 02:45 And I'll go ahead and instead of Find Next, which will then ask me to replace
  • 02:49 them individually, how about we just get done with this and hit Replace All?
  • 02:54 Click, and it tells me it made four replacements, click OK.
  • 02:58 And I'll close this box and check this out, there they all are.
  • 03:02 This is wonderful, I use this all the time.
  • 03:06 As a teacher, when I edit my documents, everything I just finished editing,
  • 03:11 I turn it green so I know what's left over to edit.
  • 03:14 Then I go in and I find all the green and I replace it with black.
  • 03:17 Just an idea for you if you have to do
  • 03:22 a lot of editing on older documents.

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