Applies ToWord for Microsoft 365 Word 2024 Word 2021 Word 2019 Word 2016
  1. In the Find what box, enter the word or phrase you want to locate.

  2. In the Replace with box, enter your new text.

  3. Select Find Next until you come to the instance you want to update.

  4. Choose Replace, or choose Replace All to update all instances without stopping at each one.

Search options

  • Search    Specify the whole document, or from your cursor upwards or downwards.

  • Match case    Find and replace words that only match specific capitalization.

  • Find Whole words only    Avoid partial matches. For example changing "One" to "Two" doesn't cause "Someone" to become "Sometwo."

  • Use wildcards    Get partial matches. For example, "the*" finds "theater", "thespian", and "thermin."

  • Sounds like (English)    Find and replace words that sound like others, for example "they're", "there", and "their."

  • Find all word forms (English)    Find and replace all verb tenses. For example, type "find", and Word will return "finds", "finding", and "found."

  • Match prefix    Works with other settings to find and replace words with common prefixes or beginnings.

  • Match suffix    Works with other settings to find and replace words with common suffixes or endings.

  • Ignore punctuation characters    Ignore differences in hyphenation.

  • Ignore white-space characters    Ignore spacing between characters.

Format button    Find and replace page formatting options like Font types or colors, Paragraph formatting (left, right, center), or highlighted words.

Special button    Find and replace page and character elements such as Em dashes, tabs, or Section Breaks.

No Formatting    Turn off formatting selections.

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