How to find the find and replace on word

Exchange one text string for another in any version of Word

Updated on October 29, 2021

What to Know

• Open the Find and Replace tool in Word with the keyboard shortcut CTRL+H.
• Find and Replace doesn’t take capitalization into account unless you specifically tell it to.
• To replace capitalization, select More in the Find and Replace box, then Match Case > Replace or Replace All > OK.

All editions of Microsoft Word offer a feature called Find and Replace. Use this tool to search for a specific word, number, or phrase in a document and replace it with something else. You can also make several replacements at once—like changing a name or fixing something you’ve consistently misspelled. Use it, also, to replace numbers or punctuation and cap or uncap words.

If you turn on Track Changes before you begin, you can reject the replacement or deletion of any unintended word. 

Find and Replace a Word

The Microsoft Word Find and Replace dialog box, in its simplest form, prompts you to type the word you’re looking for and the word you want to replace it with. Then, click Replace, and either allow Word to change every entry for you or, go through them one at a time.

To open the tool, press Ctrl+H (Cmd+H on Mac).

Change Capitalization in Microsoft Word

The Find and Replace feature doesn’t take into account anything about capitalization unless you specifically tell it to. To get to that option you’ll need to click the More option in the Find and Replace dialog box:

1. Open the Find and Replace dialog box using your favorite method. We prefer Ctrl+H.
2. Click More.
3. Type the appropriate entry in the Find What and Replace With lines.
4. Click Match Case.
5. Click Replace and Replace again, or, click Replace All.
6. Click OK.

Advanced Options

When you select the More expander in the Search and Replace dialog box, you’ll encounter several customizations. The list of items varies according to which version of Word you’re running.

Search Options

Select the check boxes to include or exclude things like punctuation, white-space characters, or substrings. Plus, apply tools like word-form matching (i.e., walked also matches walking) and Soundex matching (Karin matches Karen).

Replace Options

Word supports more advanced substitutions, too. Use special characters to substitute text markup with symbols. For example, replace a character code like & with an ampersand. This approach is useful for de-cluttering pasted HTML text that uses HTML codes to render certain symbols.

Thanks for letting us know!

Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day

Subscribe

Find and Replace Text and Numbers in Word

by Avantix Learning Team | Updated March 7, 2022

Applies to: Microsoft^® Word^® 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021 or 365 (Windows)

You can find and replace in Word using the Find and Replace dialog box as well as the Navigation Pane. If you use the dialog box, you can find and replace text and numbers and use wildcards for more advanced find and replace tasks. Wildcards are useful when you are not able to find an exact match. You can display the Find and Replace dialog box using a keyboard shortcut or the Home tab in the Ribbon.

Recommended article: How to Quickly Remove Hard Returns in Word Documents

Do you want to learn more about Microsoft Word? Check out our virtual classroom or in-person Word courses >

Note: Screenshots in this article are from Word 365 but are similar in previous versions of Word.

The Replace command appears on the Home tab in the Ribbon in the Editing group:

Using the Find and Replace dialog box to replace words or characters (and match case)

You can perform simple find and replace tasks using the Replace dialog box in its collapsed state. To access more advanced options, you will need to click More in the Replace dialog box to expand it.

To use the Find and Replace dialog box to find and replace text in Word (words or characters) and match case if needed:

1. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
2. In the Editing group, click Replace to display the Replace dialog box. Alternatively, press Ctrl + H if you prefer to use a keyboard shortcut to open the Replace dialog box.
3. Enter the text you want to find in the Find What box. You can specify whether Word should locate only matches with the exact capitalization by clicking More and then selecting or checking Match case.
4. Enter the text you want to replace in the Replace box.
5. Click Find Next and then click Replace for each occurrence or click Replace All.
6. Click Close.

In the following example, the Replace dialog box has been expanded to display other options including Match case:

Finding and replacing using wildcards

To use wildcards, you will need to use the Find and Replace dialog box and expand it to display more options. You can then select the option to Use wildcards. A wildcard can replace one or more characters in a string of text or numbers. The most common wildcard is the asterisk (*).

It’s important to note that wildcard searches are case sensitive. Also, Word uses «lazy» pattern matching so it will stop matching as soon as possible. This means that you could enter part of a word and find that part without using wildcards.

To find and replace text using wildcards in Word:

1. Position the cursor at the location in the document where you want to start finding and replacing. If you want to start at the beginning of the document, you can press Ctrl + Home.
2. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
3. In the Editing group, click Replace. Alternatively, press Ctrl + H. A dialog box appears.
4. Select More to expand the dialog box.
5. Click in the Find What box.
6. Select or check the Use wildcards checkbox.
7. Enter the text and wildcard(s) you want to use. For example, enter s*l to find any text starting with s and ending with l.
8. Click in the Replace with box.
9. Enter the text you want to use to replace the text in the Find what box.
10. Click Find Next to find the first instance of the characters you want to find.
11. Click Replace or Replace All. If you click Replace, Word will select the next matching characters in the Find what box. If you click Replace All, Word will display a dialog box with the number of replacements. In this case, click OK.
12. If necessary, click Replace again. Repeat for each instance.
13. Click Close to close the dialog box.

In the following example, b*s has been entered in the Find what box to find any word starting with starting with b and ending with s:

If you want to undo a Replace or Replace All action, close the dialog box and press Ctrl + Z.

Using common wildcards

The most common wildcards you can use in the Find and Replace dialog box are the asterisk (*) to find multiple characters and the question mark (?) to find a single character.

For example:

b*l will find ball and barrel (a character followed any characters and ending with a specific character)

h?ll will find hill and hall (a character followed by any single character and then followed by 2 characters)

Using wildcards to find one or more instances of the same character

You can also use @ as a wildcard to find one or more instances of the same character.

For example:

catchal@ will find catchal or catchall

Using wildcards for alternate characters and ranges

You can also use wildcards to find alternate characters or ranges of characters. These are entered in square brackets [ ] and may be combined with other wildcards.

[ ] can be used to find each of a set of characters

[ – ] can be used to find each of a set of characters in a range

You can use any character or series of characters in a range within the square brackets (including the space character). Characters are processed in alphanumeric order from lowest to highest.

For example:

[abc] will find any of the letters a, b, or c

[G] will find the upper case letter G

[A-Z] will find any upper case letter

[0-9] will find any single number

[13579] will find any odd number

[0-9A-z] will find any number or letter

f[ai]n will find each of the characters in square brackets such as fan or fin

[b-f]at will find each of a range of characters such as bat, cat, and fat

Using wildcards to omit characters

If you want to omit specific characters, you can use an exclamation mark (!) combined with square brackets.

For example:

[!f]ast will find last and past but not fast

Using wildcards to find the beginning or end of a word

You can use the less than symbol (<) to find the beginning of a word and the greater than symbol (>) to find the end of a word. These wildcards are combined with characters in round brackets or parentheses.

For example,

<(watch) will find watching or watchman

(all)> will find wall or stall

These wildcards can be problematic if you are using a wildcard and you want to find > or < as characters in the document. If this is the case, enter a backslash () in front of the character so that it is not treated as a wildcard.

For example,

<*> will find <h1> or <h2>

Using wildcards to find instances of a character

You can use curly brackets { } to specify the number of instances of a character. These brackets can be combined with a comma to specify the number of instances. Counting can be used with individual characters or with sets of characters.

{n} is used to find the number of instances of a character

{n,} is used to find at least n instances of a character

{n,m} is used to find between n and m instances of a character

For example:

^p{2} will find two consecutive paragraph marks or hard returns (^p is a special character for a paragraph mark in Word)

{3} will find three spaces (there is a space entered before the first curly bracket)

30{2,} will find at least 2 instances of the preceding character such as 3000 or 30000

30{3,4} will find between 3 and 4 instances of the preceding character such as 30000 or 300000 not 300

These last wildcards are particularly useful if you are finding and replacing numbers in Word.

The Find and Replace dialog box offers more functionality as well. For example, you can also Find and Replace Formatting in Word.

Subscribe to get more articles like this one

Did you find this article helpful? If you would like to receive new articles, join our email list.

More resources

How to Add Page Numbers in Word (Step by Step)

How to View Document Statistics in Microsoft Word

How to Update All Figure Numbers in Microsoft Word

How to Check Word Count in Microsoft Word (4 Ways)

How to Superscript or Subscript in Word (with Shortcuts)

Related courses

Microsoft Word: Intermediate / Advanced

Microsoft Word: Designing Dynamic Word Documents Using Fields

Microsoft Word: Long Documents Master Class

Microsoft Word: Accessible Word Documents

Microsoft Excel: Intermediate / Advanced

Microsoft PowerPoint: Intermediate / Advanced

VIEW MORE COURSES >

Our instructor-led courses are delivered in virtual classroom format or at our downtown Toronto location at 18 King Street East, Suite 1400, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (some in-person classroom courses may also be delivered at an alternate downtown Toronto location). Contact us at info@avantixlearning.ca if you’d like to arrange custom instructor-led virtual classroom or onsite training on a date that’s convenient for you.

Copyright 2023 Avantix^® Learning

Microsoft, the Microsoft logo, Microsoft Office and related Microsoft applications and logos are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in Canada, US and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of the registered owners.

Avantix Learning |18 King Street East, Suite 1400, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5C 1C4 | Contact us at info@avantixlearning.ca

Is this article up to date?

Have you ever finishing typing a letter, report or presentation only to discover that you misspelled a person’s name or had the wrong company listed multiple times throughout your document? No worries—it’s an easy fix. Using Word’s Find and Replace feature, you can quickly locate and replace text. Let’s see how it works.

Switch over to the “Home” tab on Word’s Ribbon and then click the “Replace” button.

This opens Word’s Find and Replace window. In the “Find What” box, type the word or phrase you want to locate. If you only want to find text in your document, you can go ahead and click the “Find Next” button to have Word jump to the next occurrence of that word. Keep clicking it to browse through all the results.

If you want to replace the text you find with something else, type the replacement text into the “Replace With” box. You can enter up to 255 characters in the both the “Find What” and “Replace With” boxes, by the way.

In this example, let’s say we want to replace the name “Williams” with the name “Billingsly”, so we’ve typed that text into the respective boxes. Next, we’d click the “Find Next” button to have Word locate the first instance of the text in the “Find What” box.

Word jumps the document to that point and highlights the result in gray, still keeping the Find and Replace window on top for you. Click the “Replace” button to replace the currently selected result with whatever text is in the “Replace With” box.

To replace all instances at once without stopping and reviewing each one, you can click the “Replace All” button.

Be careful when using “Replace All” because it will automatically replace all instances, including those you might not want to replace. In the example below, there are three more instances of “Williams,” but we only want to replace the next two. In this case, we would only click “Replace” for the second and third instance.

If there is a particular instance where you don’t want to replace the text, click “Find Next” as many times as needed until you come to an example where you need to replace text.

To exit from Find and Replace, click the “Cancel” button.

Of course, since it is Word we’re talking about here, there are also lots of other things you can do to make your searches more sophisticated:

• Use wildcards in your searches to narrow them down to more specific results.
• Search directly within Word’s Navigation pane to have Word show you which headings have your search terms included under them.
• Replace double spaces between sentences with single spaces.
• Search for specific formatting or special characters.

The basic of searching and replacing text in Word are pretty straightforward, but there’s a lot you can do with it once you start digging.

READ NEXT

• › What Your Function Keys Do in Microsoft Word
• › How to Find and Replace Formatting in Microsoft Word
• › How to Delete a Page in Microsoft Word
• › How to Use Find and Replace in Google Docs
• › How to Replace Any Character with Newlines in Notepad++
• › How to Search in Google Docs
• › How to Search for Text in Word
• › Expand Your Tech Career Skills With Courses From Udemy

You’ve just finished typing a presentation that’s due in about 15 minutes. But before you can celebrate your moment of victory, you realize that you’ve spelled your client‘s name wrong and have missed the double Rs in their company name multiple times throughout your document.

Cue: An aggravated scream.

The good news is that changing these small errors is an easy fix on Office 365. You can replace as many words as you want within seconds on Microsoft Word using its super helpful Find and Replace functionality.

This article will guide you through the necessary steps to help you find and replace text in MS Word.

Ready? Let’s begin.

How to Use Microsoft Word’s Find and Replace Feature

Microsoft is one of the leading companies in the world. It’s because it prioritizes its customers and comes up with innovations that can make their lives easier and more convenient.

The Find and Replace feature on MS Word is a shining example of this effort.

You can use this feature to find specific words in your file and then replace them in case there are some last-minute changes. This can even be useful when you make mistakes in the doc while typing or want to accommodate those last-minute client changes.

We’ll show you how to replace text in Microsoft Word, depending on the computer device you use.

How to Change and Replace Text in MS Word on Windows

It’s no wonder that all Windows devices have built-in Microsoft programs considering it’s a product developed by the Microsoft company themselves. If you find yourself using the word processor often for making notes or presentations, you’ll be especially thankful for the Find and Replace functionality.

Here’s a short step-by-step guide to using the feature in MS Word on Windows devices:

Step #1 Open Microsoft Word on your Windows device.

Step #2 Click on the Home tab on your top menu bar. A secondary menu will appear on your screen.

Step #3 Select the Replace option located on the top-right-hand side of your screen. Alternatively, you can also press Ctrl + H. The Find and Replace pop-up box will appear immediately.

Step #4 Type in the phrase or word you want to locate in your Word doc in the Find what field under the Find tab.

Step #5 Click on the Replace tab on the top menu bar. Type in the word you want to update in the Replace with field.

On clicking on the Replace button, the changes you want will be made one by one in the Word doc. However, if you want to update all fitting instances at once, you can click on Replace All instead.

Microsoft Word will give you a confirmation of the replacements made in your Word doc. It’ll look something like this:

How to Change and Replace Text in MS Word on Mac

Now that we’ve covered Windows, let’s see how you can use the Find and Replace feature on a MacBook. Here’s how to proceed in MS Word when you’re using an iOS device:

Step #1 Open the Microsoft Word document on your Mac.

Step #2 Take your cursor towards the top of your screen until you see your Mac’s top toolbar. Click on the Edit tab. A dropdown menu will appear.

Step #3 Click on Find from the displayed menu options. You’ll typically see a Replace… option on your screen.

But if you don’t, simply press Shift + Command + H on your keyboard. A side navigation bar will appear on the left-hand side of your computer screen.

Step #4 Enter the word or phrase you want to replace in the doc in the Search for… field.

Once you’ve finished typing the incorrect word or phrase, type in the right word or phrase that you want to replace the incorrect one with in the Replace with… field.

Step #5 Click on the Find tab to locate the matches. Once you’re sure the match is right and highlighting the words you want to change, select Replace. This will replace every individual match one by one.

Again, if you click on the Replace All button, all the matching words and phrases will be changed at once.

After the changes are made, you’ll see an “All Done” message just below the Replace and Replace All buttons that indicate the replacement of the intended word or phrase.

Advanced Find and Replace Features: Everything You Need to Know

You can take this whole shebang of replacing words and phrases to the next level thanks to Microsoft Word’s Advanced Find and Replace option. In other words, you can use the Advanced settings to simplify the process further and make the results even more accurate.

Follow the previously stated steps to open the Find and Replace pop-up box. On it appears on your screen, click on More.

You’ll immediately see a slew of additional options like Match case, Use wildcards, Match prefix, Match suffix, and so on. Here’s how the Advanced Find and Replace settings look like:

Each one of these has its own unique functions. Let’s discuss them in more detail below:

Find whole words only

If you check on the Find whole words only box, MS Word will treat your search term as an entire word and won’t look for your search term within other words.

Example: If you’re searching for the word “stand,“ the search feature won’t show you the word “standard.”

Use wildcards

Use wildcards is one of the more advanced search options that allows you to use question marks, brackets, asterisks, and other similar symbols to modify your search.

You see, a wildcat is a short string of characters – or a character – that represents multiple characters in a search.

Example: <(int)*(net)>

Sounds like (English)

As the name suggests, the Sounds like option finds similar-sounding words to your search term. This is best for finding homonyms and words that have varying spellings.

Example: This is common for words that have both UK and US variants. For instance, you can have both “colours” and “colors” on a document.

Find all word forms (English)

This option allows you to look for the word you searched for, along with other instances that are either plural or in a different tense.

Example: If you search for the word “be” after enabling the Find all word forms option, you’ll also find the words “are“ and “is“ highlighted as they are the different tense forms of “be.”

Match prefix and Match suffix

Checking off the Match prefix or Match suffix fields will limit your search to words that have the same beginning or the same ending, respectively.

Example: Suppose you enable Match prefix. When you search for the word “love,” Microsoft Word will find the words “love“ and “lovely.“ However, you won’t find the word “beloved“ highlighted in the search results as it’s a suffix of love.

Ignore punctuation characters and Ignore white-space characters

Again, this search option is self-explanatory. It tells Microsoft Word not to take up spaces, periods, hyphens, and similar attitudes into consideration.

Example: After clicking on the search options, when you type in “color block”, you’ll also see “color-block.”

When to Use the Find and Replace Feature of Microsoft Word

The whole point of the Find and Replace function in Microsoft Word is to allow MS Word users to search for target text – whether it’s a specific word, a type of formatting, or a string of wildcard characters – and replace them with whatever you want.

Typically, here’s why you should use this feature:

• When you want to maintain absolute consistency in your document
• When you want to speed up typing and formatting tasks
• When you realize last-minute mistakes and want to find and then replace your errors
• When you’re writing a document that includes words with varying spellings. For instance, if you typically follow US English, and are typing a doc according to the rules of UK English, the Find and Replace feature would be super helpful to identify and change spelling errors.
• Adding special characters to words
• editing partial words and phrases
• Correcting words that you may have misspelled in a hurry. For instance, if you type “h?t” instead of “hat” and enable Use wildcards, you’ll find it highlighted in your search.
• Eliminating extra spaces
• Changing the separator character in numerals
• Reversing currency symbols

Concluding Thoughts

As you may have realized, the Find and Replace feature of Microsoft is a lifesaver, to say the least.

It can help you save tons of time, which would otherwise have been wasted in looking for errors and then replacing them. Whether you are a student, an intern, or the CEO of a company, this is a functionality that we all can be very thankful for.

Have you ever heard or seen Find and Replace option in a Word document? Do you know what is the use with that feature? Do you want to use find and replace in a word document (Microsoft 365 Word and MS Word)? Before going to discuss how to use it, you need to know what is Find and Replace in word document. This article gives you detailed information about the use of find and replaces in word and how to use it.

What is the use of find and replace in a word document?

“Find and Replace” helps you to locate a word and replace it in a document. Before you are using this find and replace you want to enter the word which you want to find in the “Find What” search bar and the word which you want to replace in the “Replace With” search bar.

It is very difficult to find and replace a particular word in the document. This is particularly a handy process when you go through the find and replace option.

• Read: How to insert or remove header and footer in Ms-word
• How to use LastPass for securing your passwords

1. How to use Find and Replace in Microsoft 365 Word?

Video tutorial:

For our reader’s convenience, we provided this tutorial in the form of a video. If you are interested to watch then watch this video tutorial, otherwise skip the video and continue reading.

Estimated Cost: 9.99 USD

Supply:

• Microsoft 365

Tools:

• Microsoft 365

Materials: software

2. How to use find and replace in the Older version MS Word?

Note: It is not recommended to use the older versions. We recommend buying Microsoft 365 for the best feature.

Video Tutorial:

For the comfort of our readers, we provided this tutorial also in video format.

Step 1: Login into your Windows PC and open the document in MS word. You can see the “Find” option at the top right end of the taskbar.

Step 2: Select the Find option. Then the Find and Replace window is opened. In that, there is the “Find what” search bar under find which is only used to find a certain word in a document. Enter the word in the “Find what” search bar and select find the next option to find the word in the document.

Step 3: You can also highlight the selected word in the document by selecting “Highlighting All” under Reading highlighting.

If you want to remove the highlight, then simply select the “Clear Highlighting” under Reading highlight.

Step 4: If you want to replace the word with something else, Select Replace in the “Find and replace” window or from the top right end of the taskbar. Enter the text/word which you want to find in the “Find what” search bar and the replacement word in the “Replace with”.

Step 5: Select “Find Next” to locate the first instance of the word in the “Find what” search bar. Word jumps document to that point and denotes the result in blue color.

Now, tap on the “Replace” option to replace the currently selected result with the word which is in the “Replace with” box.

Step:6 If you want to replace all the instances at a time without any interrupt, then select the “Replace All” option.

Before selecting the “Replace All” option make sure that you want to replace the selected word in the entire document. if you want to replace the word at a certain point then it is better to select the “Replace” option at the place where you want to replace the existing word with new.

• Read: How to add page break in MS-Word and Microsoft 365 Word
• How to remove the page number from first page on word document

Conclusion

After reading this article, you can feel that find and replace options are the best to locate a particular word and replace it with your desired word. Without this option, it is a difficult task to find and replace a word in the document. so, this article helps you to know how to use find and replace options in a Word document.

We think with this, you got details about the find and replace in Microsoft 365 word and older version MS Word. Once again we recommend to buy Microsoft 365. Because it gives you many features.

I hope this tutorial helped you to use find and replace in word. If you like this article, please share it and follow WhatVwant on Facebook and Twitter for more tips. Subscribe whatvwant channel on YouTube for regular updates.

Let’s say you’ve written a long article and you’re about ready to publish it. But then one of your proof readers lets you know you’ve spelled a certain word incorrectly, or made some other mistake. And you’ve done it multiple times, all through that long article.

What do you do? Well, you certainly don’t want to scroll through looking for every instance of that error. So instead, you can use Word’s handy Find and Replace feature. Let’s see how to do that now.

How to Use Find and Replace in Word

Find and Replace is pretty easy to use. It just takes a few clicks.

Step 1: Navigate to the «Find and Replace» screen

When you’re in your Word document, go to the Edit tab in the main Word menu (along the top of your screen).

Scroll down until you see «Find», hover over it, and a side menu will pop out. At the bottom of that menu, you’ll see «Advanced Find and Replace»:

When you click on the Advanced Find and Replace tab, you’ll be brought to a screen with options to Find, Replace, and Go To.

Step 2: Find all mistakes

If you just want to find all instances of your mistake, you can select the first option, «Find». Just make sure you check the box that says to «Highlight all items found in: Main Document».

When you click the «Find All» button, Word will highlight all the times you misspelled the word (or whatever the issue is) and will tell you how many times it happened.

In the image below, you can see that there are 4 instances of the misspelled word «Missisippi»:

Now, if you don’t want to fix each misspelled word individually, you can use the Replace tool.

Step 3: Replace all instances of the mistake with the correct word

To do that, just click the «Replace» button (next to Find), and you’ll see this screen:

Once you’re ready to replace your misspelled words with the correct word, you have two options:

1. You can replace them all at once by clicking «Replace All». If you’re sure that you want to replace every single instance of your mistake, this is the best option (takes lots less time).
2. But you can also replace one instance at a time. Like, what if you wanted to leave one misspelling as an example? Then you can choose the «Replace» button, click it, then hit «Find Next», click «Replace» again…and so on.

If you click «Replace All», a little message box will pop up confirming the number of instances Word found, and asking if you want to search from the beginning:

Word does this just in case you didn’t start searching/replacing until the middle of the document. If you want to be thorough, just click «Yes» in the screen above.

What about the «Go To» button?

There’s one more option on the Find and Replace screen: Go To. Say you want to check page 15 specifically – you can just click on the Page Number option in the dropdown, and then enter the specific page.

This also works with all sorts of features of your document, like line number, comments, footnotes, graphs and charts, and so on. Just scroll down in the little dropdown menu that you see above outlined in red.

And just a little Word tip…

If you ever want to see how to navigate to a specific place in word, the «Help» tab is super useful.

Just click on Help, type in what you’re trying to find (like «Find and Replace») and when the answer appears, just hover over it (without clicking). You’ll see the path to what you’re searching for like this:

It even has a nice blue arrow that points exactly at the thing you’re trying to find. If you want to go straight there, then just actually click on that result and it’ll take you to the Find and Replace screen.

And that’s it!

Now you can find and replace anything in your Word document with ease! And you don’t even have to spend hours scrolling mind-numbingly through your long document searching for each mistake (and possibly missing some).

---

---

Learn to code for free. freeCodeCamp’s open source curriculum has helped more than 40,000 people get jobs as developers. Get started