Understanding the Versatility of the Find/Replace Feature in Microsoft Word:

Most people know how to use the edit menu's find and replace features when they want to find specific words and replace them with others.  But not many use this feature for replacing styles and formats and it's GREAT  for that!

Try this:

• Open a blank document and type a few sentences in it.  Now highlight a few words and format them as bold.

• Go to your edit menu and select "Replace".

• In the top box which says "find what", hold your ctrl key down and hit B (this is the shortcut key for bold).....notice below the "find what" box it now says "Font: bold".  This is a toggle.  If you hit ctrl+B again, this will now say "Font: not bold".  If you hit this combo a third time, it won't say anything.

• Now go to the "Replace with" box and hit ctrl+I (for italics). 

• Click on the button that says "Replace All" and you will see it replaces all your bold letters with italicized ones.

Pretty cool, huh?  As long as you know shortcut key combos, you can do lots of wild stuff with find/replace.  Remember the shortcut combo for underlined is ctrl+U.  Go back in that find/replace box and try some stuff.  Try replacing all italicized text (ctrl+I) with underlined (ctrl+U); bold (ctrl+B).  Then go back and replaced all bold (ctrl+B); underlined (ctrl+U) with italicized (ctrl+I); not underlined (ctrl+U twice).  Getting the picture now?

If you enjoyed this, click on that button at the bottom of the find/replace box that says "special".  In here you can replace all kinds of formatting features with others.  Try finding all tab characters and replacing them with paragraph marks; or change all those endnotes to footnotes in one fell swoop!!

To identify special characters in a document, you must turn on your show/hide button.  This button looks like a paragraph mark, which is illustrated with the other special characters here

but, of course....the most important thing is that you have FUN

Address Logo
Find/Replace
MailMerge
Paper Bkmarks
Paragraph
SaveAs?
Styles
Watermark
WordTrouble
Toolbar Probs
WordShortcuts