Microsoft Word: Find and Replace made simple

The Find and Replace function in Microsoft’s popular word pro­cess­ing program is used to find a par­tic­u­lar character string in a text and replace it with another one. As well as visible char­ac­ters such as numbers, letters and special char­ac­ters, the function also rec­og­nizes control char­ac­ters. With Find and Replace in Word you can replace tabs, paragraph marks and spaces with other char­ac­ters with ease, or even delete them al­to­geth­er. The Find and Replace function in Word is not just useful and practical for text creators and authors. The function can also be used to con­ve­nient­ly edit program scripts or HTML/XML texts. Used correctly, it can help to make your work sig­nif­i­cant­ly more efficient.

The function is par­tic­u­lar­ly efficient if an existing text only has to be changed slightly. But what many people fail to consider is that as easy and con­ve­nient as the function appears at first glance, it also has plenty of stumbling blocks to avoid. Therefore, it is important to know what the result will look like before you use the function. Let’s imagine you want to edit the recurring phrase “Press button A and B” in a text.

If you want to replace the word “and” with the word “or”, it is crucial that you copy the spaces before and after the word “and”. Otherwise, chaos is in­evitable. Wherever Word finds the character string “and”, it will blindly replace it with “or”. This will turn “hand” into “hor”, “command” into “commor” and “un­der­stand” into “understor”. The problem is that you might not im­me­di­ate­ly notice these changes. It’s highly likely that the spell checker will mark up all of these nonsense words for you. But that isn’t a foolproof method.

The Find and Replace function does make all the requested re­place­ments through­out the text and takes ab­solute­ly no account of possible dis­tor­tions made to your text.

If you have es­tab­lished that your Find and Replace feature in Word is not working as you want it to, you can easily undo the last action performed. Word’s Undo function reverses every­thing in an instant.

The “Find and Replace” function in Word is in­dif­fer­ent to the kind of char­ac­ters you want to replace. You can replace anything with anything. However, certain character strings represent par­tic­u­lar functions. For example, if you want to remove un­nec­es­sary paragraph marks, you can also do this using the Find and Replace function. To do this, go into the input screen for the function as normal and open up the advanced search options by selecting “More”. If you select “Special” and then the “Paragraph mark” option, Word au­to­mat­i­cal­ly enters “^p” in the search box.

If you repeat this (i.e. enter two paragraph marks con­sec­u­tive­ly) in the “Find what” box and enter a single paragraph mark in the “Replace with” box, you can then confirm with “Replace All” to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly replace all double paragraph marks in the text with a single paragraph mark. This function is often used when copying texts from other formats – for example websites or PDF documents – into a Word document.

If you want to replace capital letters with lower case letters, select “More” and check the “Match case” box.

Find and Replace in Word is a very powerful tool. However, we recommend prac­tic­ing a little so that the function provides you with the desired result.