How to Find and Replace Text in MS Word?

MS-Word is a powerful word processing application, used to create documents, articles, assignments, etc. with the help of features and tools provided by it. It is used to perform many operations and creating or editing files and documents. MS Word is popular in the market because of its wide variety of features like Adding Visual Effects to your text, Turning your text data into graphs, Adding visual impact to your document. 

Find and Replace

Sometimes it is difficult to look for a certain item from a list of different items from a document. It might be time taking to look for that word within each line of the document. To make this process easier, Microsoft provides its users with a tool called 'Find' to search for a specific word. 

Example:

Teacher Mrs. Desai got a Word document from her school to verify and update her information in the document, which has enormous tabular data of more than 300 teachers. She found it very challenging to see her name. But then she remembered that it can be quickly done by using the "Find" function in Microsoft Word.  Find function helped her find her information which was at row number 233.

She checked the data and found that everywhere her middle name was misspelled, the changes required at 7 places. She applied the "Replace" function from Microsoft Word. She quickly replaced the incorrect middle name with the correct one in a fraction of seconds. Great!!! Let us learn how did she do that?

Following are the steps to find and replace the word in Microsoft Word 2010:

Step 1: Go to the Home tab.

Step 2: Select the Replace option from the Editing category.

Step 3: After clicking on Replace following window will appear

Step 4: Click on the Find Tab 

And enter the word or phrase to be searched and click on Find Next. Select Find Next until you come to the word you want to update.

Step 5: Select Replace. To find and replace the text. To update all instances at once, choose Replace All.

Step 6: To Exit from Find and Replace, click on the Cancel button or the close button available in the upper right corner. 

Example:

Let us consider, there's a need to search the word "Roy" in the Word document.

Step 1: Type the word "Roy" and click on Find Next. It will highlight all the occurrences of "Roy". Click on Replace and enter the text with which the "Roy" is to be replaced. I want to replace it with "Rane" click on Replace All.

Step 2: After clicking on Replace All you will find the following message informing you about the replacements done.

And you can observe in the above image that the word Roy been replaced by Rane.

More Features:

There are some additional features provided to make our search more specific. You can select the options like Find all word forms, Match case, ignore punctuation characters, etc. which will help us to make our search more sophisticated.