Q: I use Microsoft Word a lot. There seems to be more power in the Find and Replace feature than I currently use or understand. Can you give me some ways to use Find and Replace that will help me understand it better?
A. Find and Replace is one of Word’s most powerful and flexible features – but it’s considerably underused. Most people use it to find specific content, but they don’t realize it can also run rings around many tedious tasks. Start with these easy-to-implement ways to use advanced Find and Replace settings and see what they inspire for your own day-to-day chores.
Replace two spaces with a single space
Some old school users still insert two spaces after a period. If you inadvertently do this, you can quickly replace two spaces with one:
1. Press [Ctrl]+H to open the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Click inside the Find What control, delete any existing contents, and enter two spaces (just two).
3. Click inside the Replace With control, delete any existing contents, and enter one space.
4. Click Replace All or use the Replace and Find Next buttons to find (and replace – or not) each occurrence individually.
These settings will find all occurrences of two spaces, not just those at the end of a sentence. You can refine the search by prefacing both the Find and Replace strings with a period (or other punctuation mark).
Replace multiple spaces with a tab
One of the biggest mistakes novice Word users make is to enter multiple spaces instead of using a tab to position text on the page – and those spaces can wreck a document. Fortunately, you can replace them with a tab mark by using the {} code, as follows:
1. Press [Ctrl]+H.
2. In the Find What control, enter a single space, followed by {2,}.
3. In the Replace With control, enter ^t, which represents a single tab mark.
4. Click the More button and check the Use Wildcards option.
5. Click Replace All.
The {2,} code tells Word to find two or more literal characters; the space character you entered is the literal character.
Insert new text
Replacing existing text with new text is simple. But inserting new text without deleting anything is a bit harder. For instance, let’s suppose you want to insert the text “, Inc.” to each occurrence of a company name. You can update each individually or you can use the ^& code as follows:
1. Press [Ctrl]+H.
2. In the Find What control, enter the name of the company, Harkins and Son.
3. In the Replace With control, enter ^&, Inc.
4. Click Replace All.
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