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About this lesson
Learn to quickly find a word or format and replace it with an alternative.
Exercise files
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Find Replace - Exercise.docx177.1 KB Find Replace - Exercise Solution.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:
- 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:
- Another way to open Find/Replace is the Home Ribbon, Editing group which also activates the Navigation Pane:
- In the Search box, type the word or words to find, i.e. Word
Notice all instances of that word are highlighted in the document - 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
- 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’.
- Click “More>>” to replace with Font styles or colors
- If you replace too much and want to reverse it, simply click the UNDO button on the ribbon or press Ctrl-Z.
- 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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