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About this lesson
Learn to quickly find a word or format and replace it with an alternative.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
The Find/Replace Function.docx131.7 KB The Find/Replace Function - 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:
1.Click the Find button 
on the Home ribbon or press CTRL F
The Navigation Pane appears on the left side of the screen.
2.In the Search box, type the word to find: MS Word
Notice all instances of that word are highlighted in the document
3.To replace the word, click the drop down arrow by the Search box and choose “Replace”, or type CTRL H
4.Type the Find word and the Replace word; use the buttons on the screen to move through the words individually or all at once with “Replace All”.
5.Click “More>>” to replace with Font styles or colors
6.If you replace too much and want to reverse it, simply click the UNDO button on the ribbon or press CTRL Z.
Login to download- 00:05 Hello, in this lesson I wanna teach you about the Find function.
- 00:09 If you need to find a certain word or multiple instances
- 00:12 of a certain word in a long document, it's very difficult as a human to
- 00:16 have your eyes swim through all that black and white text and find those words.
- 00:20 So instead we'll have the computer to do the work for us.
- 00:23 There's two places to find the Find function, and I've got them here.
- 00:27 Showing you the binoculars on the Home ribbon way over on the right-hand side,
- 00:32 there's your binoculars.
- 00:33 If you hit the drop-down arrow, you can Find, Advanced Find or
- 00:35 Go To a certain page.
- 00:37 Or you can just press Ctrl+F.
- 00:39 Ctrl+F is the universal keyboard command for anywhere, any software.
- 00:43 Even on the Internet, Ctrl+F will find a word for you.
- 00:47 I'm gonna go ahead and initialize with Ctrl+F and my navigation pane comes up and
- 00:51 remembers the last thing I had typed, so I'll delete that very quickly.
- 00:54 Okay, I wanna type the word the, because I want it to find the.
- 00:58 And there you have it,
- 00:59 all the instances of the are highlighted, even if they're in another word.
- 01:04 It's looking for the exact text,
- 01:06 regardless if it's included in a word or not.
- 01:09 So be very careful about that, be aware of that.
- 01:12 All right, let's find another one.
- 01:14 I want to find MS Word.
- 01:18 And there we have it, all the instances.
- 01:20 Let me see here.
- 01:22 There, we have three instances of MS Word.
- 01:25 So I want to show you down here,
- 01:28 under the navigation pane, it'll actually go from one to the next to the next and
- 01:32 show you the context of the paragraph it's located in.
- 01:36 Or you can hit this tiny little up arrow to go to the next one above it or
- 01:40 the down arrow, the next one below it.
- 01:43 It's your choice how you move around in there.
- 01:45 Okay, now what I want to do is I want to replace
- 01:49 the word MS Word with a color, okay?
- 01:53 So I'm going to go to Advanced Find.
- 01:56 I'm gonna hit the drop-down arrow on the end of this.
- 01:59 Please be aware of these drop-down arrows.
- 02:01 Please continue to click them.
- 02:03 Please continue to teach yourself, to read these lists.
- 02:06 You'll be a better computer user because you're reading these lists and
- 02:09 you're aware of what's behind them.
- 02:11 All right, I'm going to replace this time.
- 02:13 So I'm going to click on Replace.
- 02:15 I'm going to replace MS Word with MS Word, but
- 02:19 I'm going to replace it and add format to it, okay?
- 02:22 So right down here on the bottom left we have the More button.
- 02:26 When I click More, look at all this that just happens.
- 02:29 You can replace all of these, but actually I'm going to have your eyes skip over all
- 02:32 of that and come right down here to Format.
- 02:35 When I click Format I want the replaced font to change to italicized size 12,
- 02:42 and we're gonna change it to an obnoxious orange color so it really stands out.
- 02:49 And I'll hit OK.
- 02:50 And there we have it.
- 02:51 So the plain MS Word up here is gonna be replaced with a colored
- 02:55 MS Word right here.
- 02:57 Now I can go ahead and Find Next and just hit Replace.
- 03:01 Or since I know there's only three in there,
- 03:02 I can just hit Replace All and there they go.
- 03:05 I'll hit OK, I'll close this screen and we'll take a look.
- 03:09 And there we have three MS Words replaced with a colored format.
- 03:13 Now you can reverse that, and
- 03:15 you could actually take off the color to a certain word.
- 03:19 There's many things you can do.
- 03:21 Over here on the navigation pane we can find certain headings.
- 03:24 We can view all our pages and click from page one, two, and
- 03:27 three if I had more pages.
- 03:29 We can look at the results.
- 03:31 It's very versatile in how it works.
- 03:33 It's very user friendly in how it works.
- 03:36 If for some reason it didn't work the way you wanted, remember the Undo button,
- 03:41 right up here on your quick access bar.
- 03:44 We have Undo, notice it's teaching you,
- 03:46 right underneath the tool tips says Ctrl+Z.
- 03:49 I choose to use Ctrl+Z.
- 03:50 So if I didn't want that to happen with those colors, I can just Ctrl+Z, and
- 03:55 undo all of it in one fell swoop.
- 03:57 So there you have it.
- 03:58 Please go ahead and practice finding the word the, and then finding MS Word and
- 04:03 changing the color of it.
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