Find And Replace In Word 2013

Finding And Replacing In Word 2013

Find and replace in Word 2013 allows you to replace every occurrence of one word or phrase with another. Suppose that you had referred to the actor Lesley Granthem throughout your document and then at the end you realised you had spelt his name wrong. Lesley Granthem should actually be Leslie Grantham.

Without find and replace, you would have to read through your whole document again, delete the name Lesley Granthem whenever you found it and replace it with the correct spelling. And hope that you didn’t miss any. Apart from being incredibly time consuming, this process is prone to mistakes.

Fortunately, find and replace can do the task more efficiently. In your document, make sure you are on the Home tab and go to the Editing group to the far right of the ribbon. Don’t be distracted by the Find command, that’s a red herring. It’s the Replace command you want, so click that.

When you do, the Find and Replace window opens. Type the word or phrase that needs replacing into the Find what box, and the word or phrase you want to replace it with in the Replace with box.

Because we want to replace all occurrences of the wrongly spelled name, click Replace All. Helpfully, Word displays a little window that tells you how many occurrences were replace. You can just click OK on that.

The keyboard shortcut for the Replace command is ctrl + h. Notice that you can also choose to replace words and phrases on an individual basis by clicking Replace instead of Replace All. Clicking on Find Next will do precisely what you suspect it will.