Cool Tricks using Word’s Find & Replace - Part II: Highlight all instances of a word or block of text
Applies to: Word 2000 & 2003
Get out your highlighters, folks, it’s time for our next trick. Ever spent 20 minutes going through a printed document highlighting a specific word or phrase by hand? Use Word’s find and highlight feature instead and find something else fun and exciting to do with the 19 minutes you saved.
Here’s an example of a newsletter created in Word. All instances of the phrase Moogle, Inc. have been highlighted in yellow.
Here’s an example of a newsletter created in Word. All instances of the phrase Moogle, Inc. have been highlighted in yellow.
Try it yourself:
Start at the beginning of your document ([Ctrl]+[Home]). From the Edit menu, choose Find, or [Ctrl]+[F]. Type the specific word or phrase in the Find what: field. Then click the Highlight all items found in: checkbox and be sure Main Document is the selection in your drop down box.
Then click Find All. Viola!
In our example, all instances of the word(s) should be selected.
Wait… we’re not done. Now you need to select your highlight color. On your Formatting toolbar, to the left of your text color, click the drop down box of the Highlight button as shown here:
Then click the color of your highlight. Ta da! You did it! You should have beautifully highlighted text throughout your document.
Need to highlight some more text using a different color? Repeat the steps above for the new word or block of text. Here is an example of using more than one highlight...
To remove a specific highlight: repeat the steps above, but instead of choosing a color, select None from the highlighting button.
To remove all highlighting in the document: tune in for our next tip, “Part III: Find and Replace Formatting.”
A note about Word 2007. The newest version of Word, includes the yellow highlighting color in the Find dialog box and it's called the Reading Highlight.
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