Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013.
In the previous section, we looked at the use of the Navigation Pane and one of the
uses of the Navigation Pane is to find text or other objects within a document.
Now there is another way of finding text within a document although it largely overlaps with
the method you saw in the preceding section.
And it uses a dialog that’s been a feature of Word for a few versions now, and it’s
the Find and Replace dialog and that’s what we’re going to look at in this section.
Now the exercise that I’m going to perform on this file is to replace the word Choose
in it everywhere that it occurs with the word Select.
Now I don’t know how many times the word Choose occurs in this document.
At the moment within this document, the cursor, what’s called the insertion point is before
the word Reading there in the sixth paragraph, so it’s just there.
On the Home tab, the right hand editing group at the top there is Find and we’re going
to go for the second option which is Advanced Find.
Now if I select Advanced Find, I get the Find and Replace dialog.
Now it’s a pretty straightforward dialog to use.
You type what you’re looking for; in this case Choose and you click on Find Next.
Now, watch what happens.
The insertion point is just before the word Reading, paragraph six, click on Find Next,
and it finds an occurrence of Choose in paragraph seven actually.
Now the reason I’m mentioning these paragraphs and paragraph numbers is to point out an important
difference between this and using the Navigation Pane and that is that when you’re using
this Find and Replace approach the Find starts at the insertion point; so it starts where
the cursor is now and it carries on from that point to the end of the document.
When it gets to the end of the document, it goes back to the beginning and cycles right
round to where you started from again.
So, back into Find and Replace.
I put the insertion point back where it was at Reading, click on Find Next, it finds a
Choose, Find Next.
Quite a bit further down the document, you can just see that one above the dialog.
Again there’s no Navigation Pane here to list all these occurrences.
As you click Find Next again and again, it just hops from one to the next.
And then it’s getting towards the end of the document now, click again, click again,
and then before too long it gets its way back up to the beginning again.
And there we are, that’s right near the beginning of the document.
So that is a pretty straightforward way of stepping through the occurrences of the word
Choose in this document.
In addition to being able to do a straightforward Find like that, there is a button at the left
hand corner one here, More, and if you click on More, it gives access to a number of other
options which are basically very similar to the options that you get in the Navigation
Pane.
So you have options like Match case, Find whole words only, etc.
Now in addition, there are additional options down here.
I’m not going to look into these now but I’ll briefly describe them.
Format and Special, you can look for the text that you’re looking for in this case the
word Choose, with a particular font or in a particular font or with some kind of special
characters in or around it.
So it is a very, very flexible and powerful way of finding.
Now the use of Format and Special and many of these options is outside the scope of this
course, but that’s another great area to experiment in.
And if you’re looking for something in a large document sometimes being able to narrow
it down with some of these additional options can be really helpful.
Okay, so let’s get back to what we were intending to do which is to replace all occurrences
of the word Choose with the word Select.
Now I’m going to remove these options by clicking on Less, remember that button said
More before.
And I’m going to click on the Replace tab.
Now when I click on the Replace tab, it leaves my Find what there Choose but let’s me specify
what I want to replace it with.
And I want to replace it with Select.
Now at the moment, I have an occurrence of Choose actually highlighted.
So having typed in the string of characters, the text that I want to replace it with, Select,
I can click now on this button which says Replace.
When I’m doing Find and Replace in Word using this dialog, I always do a little test
first as a sort of sanity check.
So click on Replace and let me just move that dialog down again, where that said Choose
before you notice the word Select has gone in its place.
And automatically Find and Replace finds the next occurrence and I could replace the next
if I wanted to, if I wanted to do another check.
So let’s replace again, yep, that looks fine.
You see it says Select there now.
Once I’m happy that it’s working correctly, I can click on Replace All.
Click on Replace All and Word says to me All done.
We made 8 replacements.
Click on OK and the jobs finished.
Now one thing worth pointing out, if you’re doing an exercise like that and you don’t
really want to replace all, let’s suppose that I decided I was going to put these back.
I was going to change Select back to Choose everywhere and I started by saying Find Next
and on that one I clicked Replace, then I came to the next one I thought I don’t actually
want to replace that one, I want to leave that one like it is.
You can skip one by instead of clicking on Replace just click Find Next and then it doesn’t
replace that occurrence.
So you can go through and manually choose which ones you want to replace and which ones
you want to skip over, that is to leave as they are in effect.
So that’s basically how Find and Replace works.
I want to look at one other option here quite quickly.
The Find and Replace dialog or its earlier equivalence has been around a lot longer than
the Navigation Pane and one of the options that existed then and still exists now is
Go to, which is actually within the Find and Replace dialog as well.
If I click on the Go to tab, it actually gives a way of going to specific points in a document.
Now to a large extent, people now tend to use the Navigation Pane for much of this functionality,
but this is still here.
So if you want to go to a particular page, a particular section, a particular line, a
bookmark, a comment, various other types of object within a document that’s one way
of doing it.
Some of these won’t mean much to you at the moment.
Hopefully most of them will by the end of the course.
But you may well find a use for Go to later on.
So that’s it for now on this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.