FIND AND REPLACE TEXT - MS Word 2007 Tutorial

In long documents, locating a particular piece of text can become quite a task. MS Word 2007 provides tools to find and replace text in your document with ease. You will learn how to find and replace text in this lesson.

Task-1: Finding Text

Go to the About Tutorials page and download and open the practice document “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Using the Find feature of MS Word 2007

1. Find all instances of the word “Alice” in the document, and
2. Find how many times the word 'rabbit' occurs in the second paragraph.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Open the practice document “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” for this tutorial.

Task-1(a)

1. Click ‘Home’ tab.
2. Click the ‘Find’ button in the ‘Editing’ group (see Figure 1) . The ‘Find & Replace’ dialog is launched with the ‘Find’ tab open.
3. Type “Alice” in the ‘Find what’ box.
4. Click ‘Find next’ button. The first instance of the word after the cursor is highlighted. 
5. By successively clicking the ‘Find Next’ button you can see all occurrences of the word.
6. To highlight all occurrences of the word in the document, click the ‘Reading Highlight’ button. A dropdown menu will open.
7. Choose 'Highlight all' option. MS Word will highlight all occurrences of the text in yellow throughout the document and  also also show a message indicating the number of occurrences of the text found in the document.
8. To clear highlighting, click 'Reading Highlight' button and then click 'Clear Highlighting'. The highlights will be cleared.

Figure 1: Find & Replace Dialog Box

TIP!
In MS Word 2007, the keyboard shortcut for launching the 'Find & Replace' dialog box is Ctrl+F. When you do this, the dialog box will launch with the 'Find' tab selected.

Task-1(b)

1. Triple click anywhere in the second paragraph or double click in the left margin by the side of the second paragraph. The second paragraph will be selected and highlighted.
2. Press keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F to launch the 'Find & Replace' dialog box.
3. Type 'rabbit' in the 'Find What' box.
4. Click the 'Find in' button. A drop-down list will appear (see Figure 2).
5. Select 'Current Selection' from the drop-down list. You will see a message in the dialog box above the buttons saying "Word found 4 items matching this criteria". You will also observe that all the four occurrences of the word in second paragraph have been selected.

Figure 2: Drop-down Menu of 'Find in' Button in Find & Replace Dialog Box

Task-2: Replacing Text

Replace the word “rabbit” with “bunny” throughout the document.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Click ‘Home’ tab, then click ‘Replace’ button in the ‘Editing’ group. The ‘Find & Replace’ dialog will start with ‘Replace’ tab selected.
2. Type “rabbit” in the ‘Find what’ box.
3. Type “bunny” in the ‘Replace with’ box.
4. To check each match before replacing, click ‘Find Next’ button and wherever you want to make the replacement, click ‘Replace’ button. Repeat the step for each match.
5. To replace all occurrences of the searched word with text entered in the ‘Replace with’ box, just click ‘Replace All’ button. MS Word will replace “rabbit” with “bunny” everywhere in the document and show a message "Word has completed search of the document and has made 6 replacements".
6. Click the 'OK' button on the message window to close it.
7. Close the 'Find & Replace' dialog box by clicking its 'Close' button.
   

Figure 3: Find and Replace Dialog Box with Replace Tab selected

TIP!
The MS Word keyboard shortcut for launching the ‘Find & Replace’ dialog box in Replace mode is Ctrl+H.

Recap

• To find text, launch the 'Find & Replace' dialog box by clicking Home tab > Find or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F and enter the text to be searched in 'Find what' box.
• To find and replace text, launch the ‘Find & Replace’ dialog box either by clicking  Home Tab > Replace or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+H and enter the text to be searched in ‘Find what’ box  and the replacement text in ‘Replace with’ box.

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