Find Special Things in Word Documents (Oct 2014)
You probably all know how to use find to find words in a Word document. Many also know how to use Find and Replace to change words. But you can find and replace so much more when you know about it. Several ways get you to the dialog box with the special features.
In older Word versions (2007 and before) you could just press Ctrl+F and be in the Find dialog box.
In 2010 and above, pressing Ctrl+F will open a Navigation pane on the left side of the screen. Click the last tab for find. Type the word(s) in the Search Document that you want to find. A list will display showing the word in context. Click on the one you want and go right to it in the document; all instances of the word(s) are highlighted in yellow in the document, with the one you selected in green.
Click the down arrow at the right of the search box to see other options of things you can find, like graphics, tables. But if you click Advanced Find there’s even more, which is where I want to go now.
Another way to get to the Advanced Find box is, on Home tab, far right. Click the arrow next to Find and pick Advanced Find. Or press Ctrl+H and click find in the box. (This takes you to the same place the old versions did when you pressed Ctrl+F.) You can use this dialog box to do so much more. You may need to press the “More” button to see the full list. (Note that the More button changes to less and back to more when pressed again.) Here are some of the things you can look for:
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“Find all word forms” will find in one pass plan, planned, planning, plans.
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At the bottom of the box, if you click Format you can search for everything in Bold, or italic, or a certain font type and size. Just be sure to turn off the feature before you do another search for a word.
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Removing extra white spaces in the document, is easy, when you know a simple step:
- Click Replace tab (at the top)
- In “Replace what”, press spacebar
- Click Special (at the bottom of the box)
- Pick “White space” (or just press ^w).
- In “Replace with” Press spacebar.
- Then continue with find next and replace.
- After you finish or receive a document and you change it from Normal to No spacing style, you can add extra space after each paragraph using the Replace command. Press Ctrl+H to open the replace box. Click More button. In “Find what”, Click Special button (at bottom). Pick “Paragraph mark” or Type ^P. Tab to “Replace with what” and Type ^p^p. Find next, then Replace All. It will note how many it replaced.
Ever want to clean out extra >> characters from email? You can use Find for that in Outlook (not Windows Live Mail). In a message, Click Find (or Press F4 function key). Then you can find >> and replace it with nothing. Now that you have a few examples of how to use the advanced features of Find, try other combinations that will make your editing work easier. 2014-10-23