MS Word find and replace tips

One thing I often find useful in MS Word is to remove formatting from a particular block of text. (It's helpful to first see what formatting you've got in a document by turning on Show Paragraph Marks.)

Say I want to remove all the tabs in a table. Here's what I do:

1. Select the cells in the table I want to remove the tabs from.
2. Press CTRL + H on the keyboard to bring up Find and Replace (or use the menu if you don't like keyboard shortcuts).
3. In the Find what field type "^t" (without quotes). This is the code that tells Word you're looking for the tab character.
   
4. As I don't want to replace it with anything leave the Replace with field blank.
5. Select the Replace All button, select No when it asks me if I want to search in the rest of the document. Done!

That's a lot easier than pressing the Delete key 81 times (as I would have had to do for my most recent example).

If you wanted to remove all paragraph breaks you use the code "^p" in the Find what box. There are other things you can search for as well such as footnote markers - select the More (or Options?) button and then select Special and choose what you want to search for and it will put the code in the Find/Replace box for you.

Hope this is helpful.

Microsoft Word searching with formatting options

I just found a nifty feature in the search box on MS Word. I happened to press CTRL + U to try and take off underlining on the word I just found using 'Find', but actually as the search box was still active it refined the search even further so that is was searching for the word I typed in and where it had underlining applied to it. You can do three types of search like this - 'search word' + underline, 'search word' + no underline, 'search word' (i.e. find it regardless of underlining).

I'm guessing the same will work with all sorts of formatting options. Hope this might be useful to someone out there. Do comment to say if it is! I'm using Word 2007 but I'm guessing this feature has been there for a bit.