Microsoft Word has a feature that lets you search and replace a phrase in the entire document. It has a lot of options that help you to find what you are looking for.
Imagine looking for a topic or a phrase in a vast article. It’s hard to read all the documents to find them. for example, at the end of a copy, you understand that you wrote the company name with the wrong spelling, so if you want to fix them one by one, it can take a lot of time, and you may have mistakes again
In this article, we will learn about the Find, find and replace and Go To feature in MS Word
Fast Access :
- Find and Replace shortcut in Word
- How to find and replace a phrase in Word
- Advanced Search in Word
- How to Use Wildcards in Word
- Special character in Find and replace in Word
Find and replace in Microsoft Word
Find and Replace shortcut in Word
In MS Word 2003 and 2007: Press Crtl +F
In MS Word 2010 and after that: Press Crtl +H
How to find and replace a phrase in Word
Path: Go to Home Tab > click on Replace from Editing group > write the phrase you want to replace and the new phrase > click on Replace
That’s it. Now you can easily replace any text you want, but Find and Replace has some options that help you better search in Word, like Match prefix or Suffix.
The following section explains the possibilities of Find and Replace in Word.
Advanced Search in Word
To open the Options, click on the More button on Find and Replace dialog.
Path: click on the Replace from editing group > at the bottom, click on More
Now you can see several options that can be so helpful. For example, the Search field has three options; down, up, and all. It can be so beneficial in Long texts.
From here, you should use options depending on what you need.
How to Use Wildcards in Word
Wildcards are usually used for an advanced search in Word. WildCard is a character that replaces with nothing or some characters.
To understand it better, let’s see an example.
For example, you want to find the words that start with D and ends with M, so you should write the Wildcard like D*M.
Notice: the * character is used for nothing or Any number of characters.
Every walidcards character has its own capability that you can use depending on your need. In the table below, you can see some of these characters with examples.
| Wildcard | Purpose | Example |
| ? | Any single character | h?t will find hat, hot, and h t |
| * | Any number of characters | a*d will find ad, ahead, and as compared |
| [ ] | One of these characters | t[ai]n will find tan and tin, but not ton |
| [ – ] | One of these characters in a range | [b-d]ot will find bot, cot, and dot |
| [! ] | Not the specific characters | [!d]ust will find rust and must, but not dust |
| < | The beginning of a word | <(some) will find something, someone, and somewhere |
| > | The end of a word | (one)> will find stone, cone, and provolone |
| @ | One or more instances of a character | cor@al will find coral and corral |
| {n} | Exactly n instances of a character | ^p{2} will find two consecutive paragraph breaks |
| {n,} | At least n instances of a character | 10{2,} will find 100, 1000, and 10000 |
| {n,m} | Between n and m instances of a character | 10{2,3} will find only 100 and 1000, not 10000 |
Special character in Find and replace in Word
Path: Home > replace > More > special
You can insert special characters in several ways copy And paste, special button in Find and replace dialog, keyboard, etc.
