Did you know that Word's Find and Replace feature can not only find text in your document but it can also find and replace formatting? And spaces and carriage returns?

Need to quickly highlight terms or phrases in your document? Who knew that Find and Replace would do the trick? It truly is a powerful tool for instantly transforming your content.

In the next several posts, I will provide a handful of useful techniques for making the most of this underutilized feature.
 
Here is a sneak peek of what's to come:

• Part 1: Find and replace text
• Part 2: Highlight all instances of a word or block of text
• Part 3: Find and replace formatting
• Part 4: Remove extraneous carriage returns
• Part 5: Reformat a list of emails separated by carriage returns to a list of emails separated by a semi-colon.
• Part 6: Surprise/Bonus Example

Before we begin Part I, here's a helpful hint: Always be sure your cursor is at the location in your document where you'd like to start. If you need to start at the beginning, hit [Ctrl]+[Home] on your keyboard.

Part I: Find and replace text

Before we get to the advanced stuff, we have to start with the basics. Suppose you need to replace all instances of the word Moogle with Moogle, Inc. in your 10 page document. Use the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl]+[Home] to get to the beginning of your document. Then go to the Edit menu and click Replace. You'll get the following Find and Replace window.

In the Find what: field, type Moogle. In the Replace with: field, type Moogle, Inc. Then click the Replace All button. It's that simple!

If you want to Undo the global change, then use the [Ctrl]+[Z] keyboard shortcut.

Note: Don't want to "Replace All"? You can step through each change instead of performing the global "Replace All" function. Instead of clicking the Replace All button, click Find Next. If the highlighted text is one that needs to be replaced, then click the Replace button, which not only replaces the highlighted text, it also goes to the "Next" instance of the original text waiting for you to confirm it needs to be replaced. Continue clicking Replace or Find Next until Word reaches the end of the document.

Next session: Part II - using Word's Find feature to electronically highlight specific text within your document.