For example, here I’ve chosen the format to be Bold and have then entered the word “troughs” into the Find what box. You can combine format search with the standard text search. How do I search for a word in a particular format? I find it useful to select Highlight all – and as you can see, this has highlighted all of the text that’s in bold in my document: You can see that “Format: Font: Bold” appears underneath the Find what search box. When you’ve clicked on Bold (or whichever format you’ve decided to search for) you will be returned to the standard Find dialogue window. Then click the Format button at the bottom left, to bring up the familiar Format menu that you find if you right-click on any text in the document itself:Ĭlick on Font, for example, and you can search for text in any Font, Font Style (marked here as I’m searching for Bold text) or Size: To search for JUST a format, rather than a particular word in a format, you need to leave the Find what search box blank. Some good news here first of all: once you’ve found your way to the Advanced search dialogue box, the procedure from here onwards is exactly the same for Word 2007, 20. How do I search for formats in Word 2007, 20?
Another way I use this is if I need to look for manual page breaks that have been inserted into a document, or section breaks: it’s much quicker than scanning through hundreds of pages looking for formatting marks. You can search for all text that’s in italics and change it to being in bold using Replace All (or Find Next – Replace, which, as we discussed in the first article, is a safer option just to be sure). For example, you may have decided to italicise all book titles in your thesis bibliography, only to find that they’re supposed to be in no italics and bold. I’ve used this particularly when working with anything that has specific formatting for specific words or phrases.
There are lots of reasons why you might want to search for formats. Now we’re going to have a look at finding and replacing formats.
In this series of articles on Find and Replace in Word, we’ve looked at basic Find and Replace and advanced Find and Replace (wild cards and the like).