In this chapter, we will discuss the Find and Replace operation in Word 2010. While working on editing a document you come across a situation very frequently when you want to search a particular word in your document and many times you will be willing to replace this word with another word at a few or all the places throughout the document. Here, we will understand how to find a word or phrase in a word document and how to replace an existing word with any other word using simple steps.

Find Command

The Find command enables you to locate specific text in your document. Following are the steps to find a word document in the following screen −

Step 1 − Let us work out on a sample text available in our Word document. Just type =rand() and press Enter; the following screen will appear −

Step 2 − Click the Find option in the Editing group on the Home tab or press Ctrl + F to launch the Navigation pane −

Step 3 − Enter a word which you want to search in the Search box, as soon as you finish typing, Word searches for the text you entered and displays the results in the navigation pane and highlights the word in the document as in the following screenshot −

Step 4 − You can click the clear button (X) to clear the search and results and perform another search.

Step 5 − You can use further options while searching for a word. Click the option button to display the options menu and then click the Options option; this will display a list of options. You can select the options like match case to perform case-sensitive search.

Step 6 − Finally, if you are done with the Search operation, you can click the close button (X) to close the Navigation Pane.

Find & Replace Operation

We assume you are an expert in searching a word or phrase in a word document as explained above. This section will teach you how you can replace an existing word in your document. Following are the simple steps −

Step 1 − Click the Replace option in the Editing group on the Home tab or press Ctrl + H to launch the Find and Replace dialog box shown in Step 2 −

Step 2 − Type a word which you want to search. You can also replace the word using the Find and Replace dialog box as in the following screenshot −

Step 3 − Click the Replace button available on the Find and Replace dialog box and you will see the first occurrence of the searched word would be replaced with the replace with word. Clicking again on Replace button would replace next occurrence of the searched word. If you will click Replace All button then it would replace all the found words in one go. You can also use Find Next button just to search the next occurence and later you can use Replace button to replace the found word.

Step 4 − You can use More >> button available on the dialog box to use more options and to make your search more specific like case sensitive search or searching for whole word only etc.

Step 5 − Finally, if you are done with the Find and Replace operation, you can click the Close (X) or Cancel button of the dialog box to close the box.