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.