Replacing Your Preconceived Notions About Replace in Word!

You may know about the Find and Replace features in Microsoft Word, but are you REALLY as knowledgeable as you think you are? Here's your chance to find out.

At it's simplest definition, the Find function (Edit-Find or Ctrl-F) allows you to type in a word or set of characters and have the software locate each occurrence of that word for you in the document. Replace (Edit-Replace or Ctrl-H) goes one step further and allows you to replace whatever set of characters you have entered with an alternate set of characters.

But using this feature doesn't have to be simple. It can get pretty darn complex and powerful! There are many options supported with this function that most people don't even know about, much less use.

There's a button on the Replace window that says More (or Less if the options are already showing) and therein lies the power.

There may be times however when you want to have even more filters applied to your data and have them all applied at the same time. In this case you need to use Excel's Advanced Filter options.

Options Under More

Match Case - Forces Word to pay attention to capital letters. This could find Rob, but not rob for instance.

Find Whole Words Only - By default this option is turned off, which means, searching for sing would find sing, singer and trespassing. If you check this option, it would only find sing.

Use Wildcards - Allows you to use substitute characters when you don't know exactly what you are looking for. A question mark replaces a single letter. Therefore if you check the box for Use Wildcards, s?ng will find sang, sing, song, and sung. An asterisk can be used to indicate that it could be any number of letters. s*ng would find sing, sang, and string, but it will also highlight from the first occurrence of s through the next occurrence of ng (which could go across sentences and is not likely to be what you want).

Sounds Like - This feature finds homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently). Checking this box means that typing hare for example will find hare, here, hair and heir. Unfortunately (at least through Word 2000), it won't find contractions (to check their/they're or your/you're for instance).

Find All Word Forms - This will find multiple tenses of the same verb. For example, searching for is will find is, are, am, and be.

Note that when Use Wildcards, Sounds Like or Find All Word Forms is checked you will not be able to check the Match Case or Find Whole Words Only boxes.

Options on Format Button
As nice as these options are, they don't begin to cover what all Replace can be used to modify or correct. In the bottom left corner of the popup window is a button called Format. Formatting needs to be applied separately to the Find What and Replace With boxes. You can actually just replace the Format options without making any modifications to the text content at all (for example replace all highlighted text with non-highlighted text or replace all occurrences of Times New Roman with Arial). The options on the windows that popup when you click on any of the Format choices in Replace will match many of the windows you would get from clicking Format on the main menu bar, so they should look familiar.

Font - This allows you to change text formatting, such as typeface, size, bold/italic, underlining, color, character spacing, and special effects like embossing, shadowing and subscript/superscript.

Paragraph - This allows you to change indentation settings, line spacing and paragraph controls such as keep with next or widow/orphan protection.

Tabs - This allows you to change the tab settings (add, delete, move).

Language - Allows you to change the language associated with a word (used for spell check for instance). This option only works if you have proofing tools from multiple languages installed.

Frame - Allows you to change the settings of any frames that exist in your document.

Style - Allows you to replace one style with another (for example change all text that has your Heading 3 applied to it to have Heading 2 style instead).

Highlight - Allows you to replace highlighting on text with no highlighting (or vice versa).

Note: If you have modified the formatting on the Find What or Replace With box and you want to get rid of it, just click on the No Formatting button in the bottom right corner of the window.

Special

Special allows you to select characters that would normally perform actions (such as Enter or Tab) or that are non printing/not found on your keyboard (such as page or column breaks) or that would have another function if typed in the box (such as a caret mark - which is used to create special codes). Note that Special options are not available when Sounds Like and Find All Word Forms are checked. Additional options are available when Use Wildcards is checked.

These options are only available on the Special Menu when you are in the Find What box.

Comment Mark - locate the comment marks in the document
Any Character - alpha or numeric characters
Any Digit - numeric only
Any Letter - alpha only
Endnote - endnote codes
Field - find field codes (note field codes must be on in your document to do this (press Alt-F9 to toggle them on and off)
Footnote Mark - Footnote Codes
Graphics - this works only with inline graphics, not floating
Section Break - section break codes
White Space - any combination of regular and nonbreaking spaces, and tab characters (this is REALLY useful when you are importing email text!)

These options are available on the Special Menu in both Find What and Replace With:

Paragraph - find paragraph markers
Tab - find tab characters
Caret - use the caret character (normally this is the beginning of a code, so Word expects a code to follow)
Column Break - column breaks
Em Dash - locate em dashes
En Dash - locate en dashes
Manual Line Break - find all manual line breaks (the ones you entered by pressing Shift-Enter)
Manual Page Break - find all manual page breaks (the ones you entered by pressing Ctrl-Break or Insert-Break-Page Break)
Non Breaking Hyphen - the ones you entered by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Hyphen so words or numbers wouldn't split across lines
Non Breaking Space - the ones you entered by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Space so words (and names) would split across lines
Optional Hyphen - the soft hyphens that Word enters when Hyphenation is turned on.

These options are only available on the Special Menu when you are in the Replace With Box:

Clipboard Contents - pastes the contents of the clipboard (the last thing you copied or cut)
Find What - this means you would not change the text, just the formatting of whatever text is found. It is especially useful when you are doing a code search like any character in the Find What box.

Is there any doubt in your mind now that Replace is one of the more powerful and efficient features built into Word?

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