Microsoft Office Guides

You’re on page 374 of your novel when inspiration strikes and you know you just have to change the main character’s name from Eleanor to Fifi. Instead of combing through all of those hundreds of pages, hunting for each instance of “Eleanor,” you can make the change globally, throughout the whole document, with just a few clicks. To find all instances of a search term and replace it with something else, follow these steps:
1. With the document open, click Home?Replace (Alt, H, R).
Word opens the Find and Replace dialog box, with the Replace tab selected.
2. In the “Find what” box, type the word or phrase you want to replace. (In the novel example, you’d type Eleanor.) Below it, in the “Replace with” box, type the word or phrase you want to replace it with (Fifi in the example). Click Replace All (Alt+A). Word replaces all instances of the “Find what” term with the “Replace with” term and shows a dialog box telling you how many replacements it made.
3. Click OK. If you’re done searching and replacing for now, click Close.
Word closes the Find and Replace dialog box.
What if you don’t want to replace each and every instance of the search term? For example, imagine you’ve been working on a personnel report, and you realize that you’ve misspelled Bob Browne’s name all the way through, typing it as “Brown.” But you can’t just replace all instances of “Brown” with “Browne,” because then Samantha Brown’s name would be wrong. You need to see each instance in context before you decide whether to replace it. To go through a document one match at a time, replacing some instances of the search term but not others, do this:
1. With the document open, click Home? Replace (Alt, H, R).
Word opens the Find and Replace dialog box, with the Replace tab selected.
2. In the “Find what” box, type the word or phrase you want to replace. Below it, in the “Replace with” box, type the word or phrase you want to replace it with. Click Find Next (Alt+F).
Word jumps to the next instance of your search term, highlighting it.
3. If you want to replace this instance of the search term, click Replace (Alt+R).
If you want to leave the search term as it is, click Find Next (Alt+F) again.
When you click Replace, Word replaces the search term with the new term and jumps to the next match. When you click Find Next, Word leaves the search term as it is and jumps to the next match.
Tip: As you move through the document, the Search and Replace box jumps around quite a bit. So you don’t have to keep repositioning the mouse pointer, use the keystroke combinations to move more quickly through your document.
4. Keep clicking Replace or Find Next (or pressing Alt+R or Alt+F).
When Word has found all instances of your search term, it shows a dialog box that says, “Word has finished searching the document.”
5. Click OK, and then click Close.
Word closes the Find and Replace dialog box.
Tip: Want to jump to a particular page? You can get there via either the Navigation pane or the Find and Replace box. Open the Navigation pane (Home?Find or Alt, H, FD, F) and click the down arrow on the search box’s right side, then click Go To. Or select Home?Replace (Alt, H, R); in the Find and Replace dialog box, click the Go To tab. Type in the page number you want, click Next, and you’re there.

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