From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Finding and replacing text - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Finding and replacing text

“

When you need to locate content in a document, especially long documents, it can be very time consuming to do it on your own. That's why there's Find and Replace technology built into Word 2013. We're going to take a look at it now using our Style Guide document. If you jumped to this lesson, you can get caught up by opening up Style Guide3 from the Chapter2 folder of your Exercise Files. Now, if we wanted to find simple text, like the word color, for example, there's a couple of different ways to do it. Now that we have this Navigation pane -- and if you're not seeing it down the left-hand side of your screen, just go up to the View tab, and make sure there's a checkmark next to Navigation Pane. We have all of our search and replace functionality right at our fingertips here in the Navigation pane. Yes, if we go to the Home tab, you'll notice at the very far right in the editing section, we also have Find and Replace options here. So, let's say we did want to find that word, color. We click in the Search field, type in the word color, you don't even have to press Enter; it is automatically going to go to the first result, and you can see there's actually 12 results altogether in this document, and we have navigation buttons to move through them. The first one is here on page 3 of 7. Color is actually part of a bigger word, colored, and if we click the down arrow to go to the next occurrence, you can see what happens; they each get highlighted as we move through the document. We can go back as well. So that's just locating simple text. Let's click the X now in the search field to clear our search criteria, and use a keyboard shortcut to get back to the top of the document: Ctrl+Home. Alright, we can also click this little magnifying glass to search for more things. When do that you'll notice Advanced Find, Replace, even Go To. Let's check out Go To. From here it opens up the Find and Replace dialog, and you'll see tabs for Find, there's our last search, color, Replace, and Go To, where we started. So if we wanted to, for example, go to a specific page, we just type it in over here, like page 6, click Go To, and we're taken directly to the top of page 6. Maybe you would rather go to comments. If there are comments in the document, you can go to comments from Any reviewer, or if there are multiple reviewers, you can make a selection to narrow it down. Let's choose Karen Leslie, and click Next. And you might not see it; it might be in the background highlighted. You may need to go back using Previous, and sure enough, there is a comment. I'm just going to scroll up a little bit, so you can see, sure enough, it's from Karen Leslie. So that's Go To. It's just simply takes us to different parts of a document; different sections, bookmarks, lines, etcetera. Let's go back to Find now. From here, where we typed in the word color in our Navigation pane, we see it here in the Find field, and you'll notice that there are some other options down below by clicking More. We can Match case, whole words only, okay; where color was part of a larger word, we won't stop at those results by using Find whole words only. You can use wildcards if you wanted to; could be color with an asterisk. That means color, with anything after it, but nothing before it. Sounds like; all kinds of options here for you to choose from. Let's Match Case as well. Now when we click Find Next, you can see it's finding the whole word color. Find Next, again, color all by itself, and its all lowercase. So we're matching the case of what we typed in the Find What field. All right. Let's close this up. Of course, we can also get to those options from our Find and Replace options found in the Editing section on the Home tab of the ribbon. So let's use Ctrl+Home to get back to the top, and this time we're going to go to Replace, and all that is is a shortcut for opening up the Find and Replace dialog we've been working in, and clicking the Replace tab. So it just takes us directly there. Not only do we have a Find What field, but we also have a Replace With field. So, for example, if we wanted to find color, and replace it with colour -- I'm in Canada, so I'm going to spell with an O, U, R on the end. I don't care about case, it doesn't have to be the whole word, and now if I wanted to, I could go from one to the next using the Find Next button. So it takes me to the first occurrence here, the first result, and if I want, I can click Replace. It takes me to the next one. Even though it's been deleted here, as you can see in a reviewed document, I can replace it there, or skip it. So if I don't want to actually replace it, it's been deleted anyway, I can click Find Next. That will take me to the next one. Now, you may need to move your dialog box around to see things. There it is in the back, Colored versions; yes, I want to replace that one. The other option, of course, is just to replace them all, regardless of where they are. Click Replace All, and you'll see how many have been replaced; 11 more replacements were made. That's so much faster than trying to find them on our own in a document, and replacing them or retyping them manually. So we'll just click OK, and we'll close this up. Now let's go back to the Navigation pane over here for a second. We'll go back to the top of our document, Ctrl+Home, because there are more options if we go to the magnifying glass, or from the Find and Replace dialog, and go to, for example, Advanced Find. This is the Find and Replace dialog again. Find tab is selected. Not only do we have all of these search options, but we can also find other things. For example, if we go down to Format, and click the dropdown, we can find certain types of formatting. Maybe you have a certain text that's formatted using a specific font; you could search for that font, and even use Replace to replace it with another font. Same thing for paragraphs, Styles, Highlighting. There is also a Special dropdown here, where you can find things like Paragraph Markers. That will indicate the end of the paragraph. Maybe you want to remove those, so you don't have the extra space; just replace it with a space instead of an actual return. You can search for digits, for example, column breaks; the list goes on. So it's not just about searching and replacing text, but you also have a lot of formatting options and special features here as well. Let's close this up, and you can save your document. We'll continue from here.

Contents