Rutledge

Find and Replace

In Word or Excel

Document for practice

Go to the Edit menu and choose Find (shortcut key - Ctrl+F). You will get the following window. Type the word or phrase you are looking for and click the Find Next button.

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Note in the example above that the word was found within another word. To prevent that click the More button and choose Find whole words only.
 

The search begins with the current location of your cursor and proceeds down the document with each click of the Find next button, unless you have chosen another option.

You can also have the computer automatically replace one word or phrase with another.
 

Click the Replace tab and enter information as in the example below

You can either replace one instance at a time or have Word replace all instances of the word or phrase

You can search for formatting as well as text. Just click on the Format button to search for Tabs and replace with spaces.
 

The Special button extends the search to include Paragraph marks, Line breaks and more.

Find on a Webpage

For an example, I am going to use the Tech Tips page.

Let's say you wanted to teach your students to use Excel to create a graph of some data generated in class. You go to my Tech Tips page and instead of searching for the topic, you use Find  (Edit menu)

You get the following window

When you click the Next button the screen jumps to the next instance of the word on the webpage and the word is highlighted.

Use Match whole word only if you are searching for a word like Bookmark and you do not want the word Book to be selected.
 

Find on a PDF

You get a similar Find window

If you click the down-arrow, you get the following additional options.