Ms Word Lesson 11

Find & Replace in Word

While working on editing a document you come across a situation very frequently when you want to search a particular word in your document and many times you will be willing to replace this word with another word at all the few or all the places throughout of the document. This tutorial will teach you how to find a word or phrase in a word document and how to replace existing word with any other word using simple steps.

Find Command:

The Find command enables you to locate specific text in your document. Following are the steps to find a word document in the following screen:

Step (1): Let us have a sample text available in our word document. Just type =rand() and press enter to have the following screen:

Step (2): Click the Find option in the Editing group on the Home tab or press Ctrl + F to launch the Navigation pane shown in step (2):

Step (3): Enter a word which you want to search in the search box, as soon as you finish typing, Word searches for the text you entered and displays the results in the navigation pane and highlight the word in the document as well as follows:

Step (4): You can click clear button (X) to clear the search and results and perform another search.

Step (5): You can use further options while searching for a word. Click option button to display options menu and then click Options option which will display a list of options. You can select options like match case to perform case sensitive search.

Step (6): Finally if you are done with searching operation, you can click close button (X) to close the Navigation Pane.

Find & Replace Operation:

Hope you are expert in searching a word or phrase in a word document as explained above. Now this section will teach you how you can replace existing word in your document. Following are the simple steps:

Step (1): Click the Replace option in the Editing group on the Home tab or press Ctrl + H to launch the Find and Replace dialog box shown in step (2):

Step (2): Type a word which you want to search and a word which would like to replace with in the Find and Replace dialog box as follows:

Step (3): Click Replace button available on Find and Replace dialog box and you will see first occurrence of the searched word would be replaced with the replace with word. Clicking again on Replace button would replace next occurrence of the searched word. If you will click Replace All button then it would replace all the found words in one go. You can also use Find Next button just to search the next occurence and later you can use Replace button to replace the found word.

Step (4): You can use More >> button available on the dialog box to use more options and to make your search more specific like case sensitive search or searching for whole word only etc.

Step (5): Finally if you are done with finding and replacing operation, you can click Close (X) or Cancel button of the dialog box to close the box.