Word highlight same words

As a regular user of Microsoft Office Word, working on documents in Word, it is known to you that this computer program allows you multiple text editing as well as page formatting features.

When working on a lengthy Microsoft Word document, it is possible to end up repeating words and even some phrases without having knowledge of the same.

Microsoft Office Word enables you to quickly find such words and even highlights them for you to easily identify or replace.

In this article, we will guide you through a simple step by step tutorial on how to find, highlight and remove duplicate words in a Microsoft Word document.

Removing duplicate words in a Microsoft Word document

Anyone can apply the Advanced Find featureto find, highlight and remove duplicate words in a Microsoft Word document by following the few easy steps below:

Step 1. Click the Home tab in the top left corner of your document, if it is not already selected.

Step 2. Click the small arrowhead next to Find in the Editing group at the top right corner of your Microsoft Word document.

Step 3. Select Advanced Find from the drop down menu displayed.

Step 4. The Find and Replace dialog boxpops up. Type the word you want to check for in the box.

Step 5. Click the More button in the bottom left corner of the dialog box to view more options. 

Step 6. Place a check mark in front of the Find whole words only option.

Step 7. In the same dialog box, click the Reading Highlight button and then Highlight All to find all duplicate words and highlight them.

Step 8. Click Close to close the Find and Replace dialog box. The results i.e duplicate words remain highlighted.

Step 9. Go ahead to remove the duplicate words highlighted in your Microsoft Word document.

How Simul Docs simplifies working with Microsoft Word documents

Whether you are working alone or as a team on a document under Microsoft Office Word, the answer to a simpler process is Simul Docs.

Simul Docs completely eliminates the cumbersome process of continuously sending back and forth emails sharing different versions of the same Microsoft Word documents, with version names such as: “Project Y 2.0”

This version control and collaboration tool of Microsoft office, allows multiple collaborators access to the original Word document, which enables all the authors to work remotely from different locations.

Even when all the collaborators are making changes to the Microsoft Word document simultaneously, Simul Docs recognizes this, and as a result saves each person’s work as different versions of the document. This ensures that no changes are lost, overridden or deleted.

Furthermore, just one click of the mouse under Simul Docs compiles all the different versions of the Word document, with each author’s changes marked up as tracked changes in Microsoft Word, allowing you to easily identify the differences, accept and reject the changes, and fix any conflicts.

With Simul Docs, creating a database of your working process is a given. By recording all the changes made to your Microsoft Word document, Simul Docs gives you and your team access to the full history of changes made, which is useful for keeping track of the working progress.

Simul Docs makes it easy for you and your team to keep track of the changes made to your Microsoft word document in real time. This is through comparisons of the different versions of the Microsoft Word document, whether or not the tracked changes were turned on, which aids in easy monitoring of what changes were made, who made them and when.

Reverting to the previous versions of the Microsoft Word document in the event that the need arises to restore the original version is easy courtesy of Simul Docs.

Simul Docs has also proved very helpful in taking content from the previous versions and adding it to the latest and final draft of the Microsoft Word document.

When it comes to sharing the document to other people with no knowledge of Simul Docs, you can simply download the latest version of your Microsoft Word document, and share it via email. You can also export the document using cloud storage tools, for example: SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive to mention but a few.

Therefore, whether you work with a company, a government organisation or even a non-government organisation, introducing Simul Docs into your day to day working process, is a great business decision. This version control and collaboration tool will enable you to execute tasks quicker and with ease, in just a few clicks.

Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Highlighting Duplicate Words.

Joe is an author and he has some ideas for using Word macros to help with his proofreading. One of the macros he wants to build is for finding duplicate words in sentences and paragraphs. He wants to exclude the common necessary words like «the,» «a,» etc. Joe would like to highlight the duplicate words in a document so he can examine their use and make appropriate changes.

How you go about this depends, really, on how you want to approach the task. For instance, if you want to simply look for duplicate words that are side-by-side, then Word should do that already for you; the grammar checker takes care of marking those duplicate words.

If you, instead, want to find excessive instances of a particular word, then you can use Find and Replace to highlight them. On the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box you can enter the word you want to highlight, click the Highlight All Items check box, and then click Find All. Word selects all instances of the Word and you can then use the Highlighter tool to highlight all of them.

Finally, if you want a macro that will step through each paragraph of the document (or each sentence of a document) and look for multiple instances of any given word, then that is a much more complex issue. Stepping through either paragraphs or sentences is not a huge problem; just use either the Paragraphs collection or the Sentences collection in the macro. The bigger problem is dealing with text variations. For instance, does the word «dog» match the word «dogs» or, even, the word «dogged.» Without a firm understanding of what, exactly, you want to consider as «matching,» your macro can get rather cumbersome.

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen…

You’ve seen printed documents with sections of text that had been highlighted with a marker in yellow or some color. You can highlight text in MS Word documents without printing them out and using a marker. Keep reading to find out how.

How to highlight text in MS Word

We’ll look at two types of highlighting. The first is highlighting one or more words alone or within a sentence.

Highlight one or more words in Word

To highlight text in Microsoft Word, select the text you wish to highlight. Then:

• Open the Home tab of the ribbon.
• In the first section of the Home tab you’ll see the Paste section. The next section to the right is the text section where you can change fonts, font sizes, and more. In this section look for a small icon on the bottom row that looks like a tiny marker above a colored line.
• Click that marker icon to open a panel of colors you can select to highlight your text.
• Choose a color.

You should now see your text highlighted with the color you chose. Word is actually placing a colored background behind those words that you selected. The remainder of the sentence will not be highlighted.

NOTE: If you have your computer set to dark mode, you may have white text on a dark background. In this case, some highlight colors may be barely visible or not at all against the dark background. However, if you print the page or view it in light mode with a white background, you will see that the highlight is indeed there.

Highlight an entire paragraph in Microsoft Word

You can easily highlight an entire paragraph or more in MS Word using the previously mentioned method of selecting all of the words in the section you wish to highlight, then using the highlight button.

Highlight words, sentences, or paragraphs in MS Word using Shading

The second type of highlighting we’ll learn allows us to highlight the full width of the entire paragraph block.

Word provides another method of highlighting single words, entire sentences, and paragraphs, but it calls it shading. Here are some differences between highlighting and shading.

• More colors are available with shading than when you use the highlight button in the Home tab.
• Shading allows you to highlight words with a patterned color. Basic highlighting allows colors only.
• Highlighting all of the text using the select and highlight method mentioned previously highlights only the text and the blanks between words. It does not highlight the entire margin to margin block that shading provides.
• Shading can be used to place a color background behind an entire paragraph from left margin to right margin even if it is a one word sentence. If your document or design called for it, you could have two or three words centered with a rectangle shaped background from left margin to right margin.

You’ll find the Shade function hidden away under the Design tab. With the Design tab open, look all the way to the right for a button/icon labeled Page Borders. If you mouse over that button, the tooltip will say Borders and Shading.

To shade specific words:

• Select the text.
• Under the Design tab, click the button labeled Page Borders on the right end of the ribbon.
• From the box that opens, select the Shading tab.
• On the left side, click inside the box below the Fill label.
• Choose your shade (highlight) color. If you don’t see exactly the color you need, select the More Colors… button below the current color choices. From there you can find practically any color you could wish for.
• On the right side, you should see a square with your selected words in it. Below that square, click in the box to choose Text or Paragraph.
• To highlight only the text you’ve selected, choose Text. To highlight the entire paragraph block which extends from the left margin beyond the last word to the right margin, choose Paragraph.

I’ve included photos of a Microsoft Word document that illustrates the use of the different highlighting and shading uses that I’ve discussed in this article.

I consider the Word’s shading function to be more useful than the highlighting function if you need any more than the most basic highlighting—select a word and highlight it with one of fifteen colors.

With a little forethought, the shading function can be quite useful in laying out a document with accented sentences, creating signs, or designing pamphlets.

You can find more tips for using Microsoft Word here.

You’ll find video tips for using Microsoft 365 here.