Finding and replacing text

Sometimes you may have a need to locate a particular bit of text within a document, and in some cases, even replace that text. And just scrolling through the text is obviously not the most efficient way to find a particular bit of text. In this case, for example, I have a document that is over 1,900 words long. And so, scrolling through and looking for a particular bit of text would not be very fun, nor very convenient. This is where the Find and, potentially, Replace options come into play. I'll go ahead and click the Find button and that will bring up a Find dialog.

And I have a tendency of typing imaging sensor when I actually want to say image sensor. It's one of the minor little errors that I have a tendency of making, and so I'd like to search for the word imaging to see if I have that word in this particular document. In other words, if I've made that particular mistake again, I'll go ahead and click the Find Next button. In other words, I want to find the next instance of that word. And sure enough, imaging sensor appears, when I prefer to use the term "image sensor." So, that means that I need to replace some text.

You'll notice that we have a Replace button on the ribbon, but we can also, once we're in the Find dialog, simply go to the Replace tab. So now, I need to be very specific about the text that I want to find. I'm going to type in, not just imaging, because what if I have the word imaging in the context of something different and I don't actually want it changed? So instead I'm going to find "imaging sensor" and I'm going to replace that entire string of text with "image sensor." I can then specify if I want to replace the next instance, or all instances of that term.

So I'll go ahead and click the "Replace All" option, and you'll see that the text is replaced. I'll go ahead and move this dialog out of the way and we can see that imaging sensor was replaced with image sensor and I also get a confirmation that Word has completed the search and has replaced that phrase a total of 14 times. So, obviously, it is a favorite mistake of mine to use the term imaging sensor when I mean image sensor. But perhaps, even more obvious is that it's very easy to search for specific text within a document but also to replace that text as needed with a variation on the text. I'll go ahead and click OK, and I'm going to close this dialog and then I want to show you one additional thing here.

I'll scroll back up to the top of the document and I'm going to place the insertion point at the beginning of the text, at the beginning of the title in this case, for the document, and then I'm going to click one more time on the Find option. And this time I'll just type sensor, and then I'm going to click Find Next and we'll see, of course, the title includes the word sensor. But the key thing I wanted to show you here is that we're able to then click Find Next again, and again, and again, and navigate throughout the document in order to find multiple instances of various elements of text.

So, in this case just a single word, but I could also type a phrase and search for that as well. So, whether you just need to locate a particular bit of text so that you can, perhaps, correct it, or change formatting for it or you want to completely replace all of the text in your document. Its very easy with that Find and Replace capability. And in fact, you have some additional options as well. I'll go ahead and click the More button, and you'll see that we, for example, can match case. So, if I made a mistake in, for example, capitalizing or failing to capitalize a particular word, I can have my replacement include a case correction as well.

So, for example, if I failed to capitalize a proper noun I can choose to replace with a proper noun. Let's just pretend for a moment that sensor should be capitalized in all instances. I can replace the word sensor with Sensor with a capital letter, and as long as I have that Match Case option turned on, the replacement will also affect the case as well. That's not the case, no pun intended, by default. By default, only the words will be changed, and the case and all formatting will be left exactly as it is. And this is just one of the many options we have in terms of fine-tuning the overall Find and Replace capabilities.

But I think you'd have to agree that searching for text within a document and even replacing text is very, very easy.