Knowledge Center
Find It Fast and Replace it Even Faster
The "Find" and "Replace" tool can of course serve as the tool that it is, to find and replace text. However, the find feature can be used as a shortcut tool to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
First let’s talk about how Find and Replace works. Let’s say you are looking for a contract for your business. You have a friend who is in the same business that you are and has been using a contract that is all-inclusive and would be perfect for your business needs. They email you the file and give you permission to begin using the file for your business as well.
Great! You’ve just saved a small chunk of change in legal fees as you now have the contract that you need. There is one problem. Their business name appears throughout the entire fifty plus page document.
So now, how do you solve this dilemma? Of course…we’ll use find and replace.
To protect all parties involved and to avoid plagiarism let’s use the simple sample paragraph below as an example.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This contract is hereby effective on ___date___ between customer and XYZ Company. Customer agrees to pay for all services provided by XYZ Company for the below named project. XYZ Company agrees to provide timely and accurate services as described throughout the contract. Customer agrees to hold XYZ Company harmless for work not delivered due to bad weather, product damage, accidents or other unavoidable acts of nature. XYZ Company agrees to hold customer harmless for work not delivered due to bad weather, product damage, accidents or other unavoidable acts of nature.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this short paragraph, XYZ Company appears five times. Just imagine how many times it appears in the entire document.
Now let’s use the find and replace tool to replace XYZ Company with ABC Company.
If this paragraph represented the entire document there would not be a need to select the text. However since we’re only working with a paragraph in this training example we will select that contract paragraph.
Choose “Edit”, then “Replace” and a dialog box will appear.
In the Find what box type in XYZ Company. It’s important that this text is typed in exactly how it appears through the document with the same spacing and spelling.
In the Replace with box type in ABC Company. Again, type this text with the proper spacing, capitalization and spelling as you would like.
Under these text boxes that we just used there will be a series of selection buttons. Let’s talk a little more about these and their functions.
Find Next will simply bring you to the next instance of XYZ Company. In our situation this really doesn’t help us as we would still need to manually type in ABC Company to make the replacement.
The other option is replace. Well…now we’re getting somewhere. By choosing replace the next instance of XYZ Company will be replaced with ABC Company. This is nice, however this is not the best choice in this situation since our document is rather lengthy and XYZ Company appears hundreds of times throughout the document.
Let’s instead choose Replace All. Immediately all instances of XYZ Company are replaced with ABC Company. In addition you are given a total number of replacements made. This is when you completely appreciate all of the work that you’ve saved.
There is one other way to use this feature and that is simply using the Find feature on its own. Why would you do this you may be asking? We’ll let’s say that you have received a very large Word document that you are to use as instructions to complete a project. You are short on time and you are unable to read the document from start to finish, and on top of that, the document does not contain a table of contents.
You know what you’re looking for you just can’t find it as it’s buried within the document somewhere. Meanwhile the clock is ticking away. Here comes the find feature to the rescue.
You are looking for the words “budget justification”. To do this, again choose “Edit”, but this time choose “Find” and a simpler dialog box will appear. (Or an even faster way is to use the shortcut keys by holding down the Control Key and then pressing the letter F at the same time)
In the Find what text box enter the words “budget justification” and choose “find next”. Just like magic you are brought to the area of the document that explains the budget justification. Wow, it’s on page 212, now that might have taken you a good part of the afternoon to find on your own!
Kimberly Deprey
Copyright 2008
