Great features of Replace in Word

There is a feature most people know of and swear they don’t need training on, yet when I go through what it can do, they never knew about most of them!

I can say this about quite a number of features , if you are like most people you tend to learn what you need to to get by.

There is a lot more to replace then just replacing words or phrases with words or phrases.  There is a more button at the bottom of the dialogue box which will expand and give more options.

Some of these options were in the standard part of the window, this screen shot is from Word 2007. You can match the case, you know you have wRITTEN iN tOGGLE cASE and need to locate it.

Using wild cards can be useful, * for anything.

The best part is format and special. I do use Special a lot more then format but both are great tools. Have you even copied something from the internet and found that the format goes funny? When you use the ¶ is not at the end of each paragraph, instead is a  This is called a manual line break, and you don’t have to go through the document manually changing them, in special there are codes for all sorts of non printing characters. Find a manual line break and replace with a paragraph mark.

Within Format you can locate specific formats and replace them with others, such as locate red font and replace with blue. I would not use this in place of styles but when the person who created the document has formatted manually, then this is a quick way to update the formats without having to apply the correct styles to text.

The next time you need to update a document see if you can’t use some of the other features of Replace.