Tutorial for Word 2016 (Part 5): Use Find and Replace

Introduce Find and Replace

When working with a long document, it will be very difficult and will certainly take a lot of time to find a specific word or phrase. Word can automatically search your document using the Find feature and it allows you to quickly change words or phrases using the Replace feature.

Refer to the video below to learn more about how to use Find and Replace:

In addition, you can refer to the Complete Guide of Word 2016 (Part 1, 2 and 3) here:

1. Complete guide Word 2016 (Part 1): Familiarize yourself with the Ribbon interface
2. Complete guide Word 2016 (Part 2): Get familiar with OneDrive, create, save and share documents
3. Word 2016 Complete Guide (Part 3): Get familiar with basic text manipulation
4. Full Word tutorial 2016 (Part 4): Formatting text

1. Find text

In the example below, we write an academic report and use the Find command to find all the objects of a particular word.

1. From the Home tab , click the Find command. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + F.

2. At this time, there is a navigation panel on the left side of the screen.

3. Enter the text (words or phrases) you want to find in the box at the top corner of the navigation panel. In the example below you can see the keyword we searched for in the document:

4. If the text (word or phrase) you find is found in the document, it will be highlighted in yellow and a preview of the results will be displayed on the navigation panel. Or alternatively you can click on each search result one of the results under the arrow to jump to that word or text.

5. After finishing, click on the X icon to close the navigation panel. The highlighted text will disappear.

- To display more search options, click the drop-down arrow next to the Search box.

2. Replace the word or phrase

Sometimes in some cases you find that you have made many repeated errors throughout the document - such as spelling your name must be capitalized or you need to change a word or phrase with another word or phrase. You can then use the Find and Replace feature in Word to quickly manipulate. In the example below we use Find and Replace to change the name of a journal, so it is abbreviated.

1. From the Home tab , click the Replace command. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + H.

2. At this time, the Find and Replace dialog box will appear.

3. Enter the word or phrase you want to find in the " Find what: " box.

4. Enter the word or phrase you want to replace into the " Replace with: " frame. Then click Find Next .

5. Word will find the word or phrase you entered in the " Find what: " box and mark the word or phrase in gray on the document.

6. Review the word or phrase you want to replace. In the example below, the phrase we searched for was part of the title of the article and so we didn't need to replace it. Click on Find Next again to switch to other objects.

7. If you want to change a word or phrase, you can click Replace to change each word or phrase. Or alternatively you can click Replace All to replace all objects of the word or phrase throughout the document.

8. Those words or phrases will be replaced.

9. After finishing, click Close or Cancel to close the dialog box.

- To display more search options, click More in the Find and Replace dialog box. Here you can set up additional search options such as Match Case or Ignore Punctuation.

You can refer to some of the following articles:

1. 8 tips or handling columns in Microsoft Word

2. Create a quick dot (……………) line in Microsoft Word

3. Enter the serial number and the automatic initial character MS Word

Good luck!