Search and Replace Specific Formatting (fonts, styles,etc) in Microsoft Word
If you’ve ever worked on a document originally created by somebody else, you’ll most likely immediately be frustrated by their horrible choice of fonts and formatting. What you might not realize is that the search and replace functionality in Word allows you to replace more than just text.
You can easily search and replace all bolded or italicized text in a document, for instance. Or you could remove that ugly Heading 2 style they used… what were they thinking using bright red?
Open up the Find and Replace dialog from the menus, or just use the Ctrl+H keyboard shortcut.
Click in the blank Find box, and then you can use the regular keyboard shortcuts to specify specific formatting. For instance, if you wanted to replace all bolded text with regular text, you’d use Ctrl+B in the “Find what” box, or for italics you would use Ctrl+I. You can even use multiple search criteria here.
If you have styles that are more difficult to replace with simple keyboard shortcuts, you can click the “More” button on the lower left-hand side to show a lot more options.
The “Format” dropdown will give you access to select specific formatting options, like fonts or styles. Just make sure that you first click in the “Find what” box before you select an option.
For the “Replace with”, you’ll need to click in that box first, and then select the options that you want just the same.
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You have once again outdone yourself with a very good article. You always find the things that we would need most but never look up ourselves
hi,
i noticed your screen shots are on windows vista , does this trick also work on word 2003?
Yes, it also works on W2K3.
Now if only there were an easy way to get rid of ALL CAPS!
Great article. I grapple with removing hard returns from e-mails for printing, daily.
What do I do?
Good article. Just two comments:
1) If you need to do a subscript/superscript change (eg, change the 2 in H2O to a subscript) you can either write a macro or (super-secret tip!) find the first occurrence, change the 2 to subscript, highlight the formatted text and press Ctrl+C (copy). Then, in the find/replace dialog, put H2O in find and “ctrl+c” in replace. This will take the text from the clipboard and “paste” it over all occurrences of H2O. The only downside is that the original formatting (e.g., bold or different font) is not maintained (I think you’ll need a macro for that.)
2) If you don’t like their use of Header 2, wouldn’t it simply be better to reformat Header 2 instead of using find/replace?
@JaimeZX: Not sure if you’re trying to search for and replace ALL CAPS, but if it’s a small amount of text, you can use Format>>Change Case… This won’t however do a find/replace, it only changes your highlighted text.
I notice that my drop down box does not contain the extended styles for customized formatting. What if I want to replace a custom style with a different, yet custom style? Any tips for making such happen?
@Jeremy
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@JaimeZX: I have found choosing a style and selecting all text of that style (right click the style name) to be an easy way to highlight a large amount of ALL CAP text and changing case at once. However, I can’t fiugre out how to get the TitleCase options to ignore words like ‘and’ ‘the’, etc. For this, I have written a macro using find and replace wildcards – works nicely.
Does this find and replace trick also work with Word 2002? I need to replace all italics with bold in a document. Thanks.
I want to know how to keep the Specific Formatting off. I have to keep selecting No Formatting when I have to search through a 300+ page document for simply the words/phrases.
I have Microsoft Office 2007 and I used to be able to save and print text that had been highlighted. I can no longer do so. My antispyware program detects no virus in my computer but something is going on. Please help!!
my letters are so small and the picture is not big and it doesn’t cover all the way
Hi all,
I want to use wildcards to search (and replace) fonts item. How can I do? Please help. Thanks