Find and Replace in Word, Part I
~~Susan Gross, BellaOnline's PC Advice Host
Microsoft Word has a very versatile tool
in its Find/Replace dialog box. You probably have used it to find and
replace words in documents. However, it is able to do much more than just
simple replacement of one string of characters with another. It supports
special characters in the search field that can be used to find/replace more
than just letters and numbers; it can also find and replace document and
character formatting. There’s so many things that it can find and replace
that I’ve split this article into two parts.For example, if there was a
long document in which the word literature was misspelled as litterature and
the document also contained the words bitter and better, you would want to
make sure that the replace didn’t change those words. You could, of course,
use the find and replace feature in Microsoft Word to find the word
litterature and replace it with the correct spelling literature.
There is an easier way to do this using find and replace that requires
less typing. Use the special character ^$ to match any letter. In
this case you should use ^$^$ which matches any two letters. In the
find box type ^$^$era and in the replace box, tera. This will
find any word that contains two letters followed by the string "era"
Other special characters used by find/replace when modifying the content
of a document:
^# matches any digit
^? matches any character, including spaces
Here is another illustration of the capabilities of the find and replace
function. The data in the following sample is correct. The only problem with
it is that should be lined up in tabbed columns. So whatever characters used
in this find and replace must only change the format of the document, not
any content.
The columns you see below are separated by spaces but not a consistent
number of spaces. So it's not possible to do a global replace of spaces with
tabs. However, there is a special character that represents white space in
the find/replace dialog box. In Microsoft Word, white space is any
combination of spaces and tabs.
To correctly format this data without using a table, search for ^w
white space of any length, and replace it with ^t a tab character and
it will look like this:
I hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of some of the features of
find/replace in Microsoft Word. Look for part 2 to be available soon.
Susan Gross is a Software
Support Specialist, writer, information researcher and web designer. She
enjoys helping people learn to use computers, reading and searching the WWW
for interesting sites. Recently, she became the host of
BellaOnline's PC Advice site, and is busily adding content to it. She
welcomes any suggestions you may have for topics to cover. You can email her
at pcadvice@bellaonline.com
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