How To Find and Replace in Word

Sometimes it might be difficult and time taking to locate a specific word or phrase when you are working with longer documents. You get a feature in Microsoft Word where you can automatically search for your document or word using the Find feature and change it with other words or phrases using the Replace feature.

How To Find Text

This is how you can use the Find command to locate all instances of a particular word in a document:

1. Click on the Find command from the Home tab. You could also use the keyboard shortcut by pressing Ctrl + F.
2. On the left side of the screen, the navigation pane will appear.
3. In the field at the top of the navigation pane type the text that you want to find.
4. If the text is traced in the document, it will be highlighted in yellow and also shown in the navigation pane. As you click on any of the results below the arrow, the screen will jump to it.

5. Then click the X to close the navigation pane after you are finished and the highlight will disappear.

You can click the drop-down arrow next to the search field for more search options.

How To Replace Text

Sometimes, we tend to make a mistake throughout a document or we find out that we had misunderstood something as we typed it during a lecture, in such cases you need to exchange a particular word or a phrase with another. Here the Find and Replace feature of Microsoft Word comes to our rescue allowing us to make quick revisions.

This is how we can use Find and Replace to change a word or a phrase in a text document :

1. Click on the Replace command from the Home tab. You can use Ctrl + H as the keyboard shortcut.
2. You will see that the Find and Replace dialogue box has appeared on the screen.
3. Type what you want to find in the Find what: field
4. In the Replace with: field type the text that you want to replace it with, and then click Find Next.
5. The first instance of the text would be found and will be highlighted in grey.
6. Then just read the text again to make sure that you want to replace it. Then you can click on Find Next again to jump to the next instance.
7. You can click on Replace to replace the text and you can also click on Replace All if you want all the instances of the text to be replaced throughout the document.

8. The text will be replaced.

9. After finishing, click Close or Cancel to close the dialogue box.

You can also select additional options like matching cases and ignoring punctuation by clicking More in the Find and Replace dialogue box.

There is one thing that you must remember in the case of Replace All, i.e. it might find some matches that you didn't anticipate and might actually not want to change. So, you should make sure that you really want to replace all the matching words before choosing this option.