What do you need to know to pump up the Find and HIU replacement Replace features in Microsoft Word to save time and avoid tedious manual editing?

Replacing Formatting

Replacing Special Characters

How to Remove Something Completely

Quick Look at the Basics

Although your options to Find and Replace text and special characters in Microsoft Word are more robust than the other members of the Office suite, the basics to get started are the same for each program.

Keyboard shortcuts to Find and Replace:

Find = [Ctrl] + F

Replace = [Ctrl] + H

Find or Replace commands are also found in the Home tab > Editing group.

Once you open the dialog box to Find or Replace, let's assume that you are comfortable with the basics to find or replace simple text. What else can you do to be more productive editing your documents?

Quick Tip: Save your documents before launching a Replace command because you're making a lot of changes at one time.

Replace Formatting

Searching for and replacing instances of a particular font, font size or font style is simply a matter of opening up the Replace dialog box. Next, click the More>> button to display a number of extra options, and then choose the appropriate selection from the Format drop-down list, which includes Font, Paragraph, and Tabs.

As an example, what if you want to find all occurrences of "important" and color them red? You could just do a standard Find command, stopping each time the word is found to manually apply the color but you know there is an easier way.

If you wish to replace all of the instances of a particular word in the document with a formatted version of itself, the first step is to simply type the word you want to format into the Find what text box.

Next, type the same word into the Replace with box and click on the Format button to bring up a drop-down list. From this list, select Font and then select the desired color for the replacement text (in our example, red). Then close the dialog. Notice the formatting choices displayed immediately below the text entry in the text boxes.

Now click the Find Next, Replace or Replace All buttons depending on how you want to control the results.

You're not limited to finding a particular word or phrase combined with formatting options - you can leave the Find what blank and only choose formatting attributes. For example, leaving Find what blank and choosing the italics formatting will find all text that is italicized. Use this to replace unwanted formatting - for example replacing all italics with bold or a different font style instead.

Quick Tip: To continue with a new Find or Replace action, first clear the previous formatting choices for each text box entry with a simple click on the No Formatting button. This button is only available if a formatting choice is selected.

Replace Special Characters Using Wildcards

Replacing special characters is another useful and less obvious ability of the Microsoft Word Find and Replace commands. First, bring up the Replace dialog box, and then pick the More>> button to show additional options. Now click the Special button to display a drop-down list, and choose the item you want to include in your search.

The special characters include paragraph marks, tab characters, and page breaks to name just a few of the more common ones. Don't be surprised when Word displays these special characters as a code with a ^ (caret) symbol in front of a letter. For example, a paragraph mark = ^p, tab = ^t, manual page break = ^m.

Replacing the item is simply a matter of entering what you want to use as a replacement (text or special characters) in the Replace with text box, followed by clicking Find Next, Replace or Replace All.

Example: Replace Two Paragraph Marks with One Paragraph Mark

The paragraph mark is normally hidden but can be seen when you choose to view all characters with the Show/Hide icon found on the Home Ribbon. The command icon and paragraph mark displays as a funny backwards letter P.

When you paste text from one place to another - between web pages, downloads, emails, and documents, you can sometimes end up with too many paragraph marks or not enough. Or you might want to replace occurrences of two paragraph marks with one mark. Replace can help you fix these paragraph mark problems quickly.

Replace two paragraph marks with a single paragraph mark HIU replacement by entering ^p^p into the Find what text box (or select fom the Special list), and then type a single ^p into the Replace with text box. After clicking Replace All, every double spaced paragraph will be replaced with a single spaced paragraph. Other problems such as too many spaces in text