Microsoft's text editor is one of the most used worldwide. Its success has been such that even its competitors have been inspired by its operation, and the best thing is that it continues to improve day by day. So that you become a specialist in its management, we are going to explain to you how to search for words in word quickly and easily.
One of those Word tricks that help you achieve much more efficient use of this tool. It will be very useful when searching for specific content, or making changes to the document.
Why is it important to know how to search for words in a text document?
Whether for work or academic reasons, I'm sure you have to use the text editor quite frequently, which makes it important that you know how to handle it well. Knowing and using the word search functionality in a Word document can be useful for:
- Gain efficiency in editing. If you have to work with a long text, knowing how to find and replace words or phrases quickly will help you save a lot of time. Because you won't have to continually read the document.
- Review the text. By searching for specific words you will be able to detect spelling, grammatical errors or any other problem that may have arisen during writing. For example, if you notice that you spelled a word incorrectly, you can look it up and check to see if you were confused.
- Organize the content. When we prepare large documents, we may later find that the organization of the content is not the most appropriate. By searching for certain terms we can locate key paragraphs and adjust the structure.
- Work collaboratively. If several people are working on the same document, the search function makes it easier to find the contributions of the rest of the collaborators.
- Browse faster. To quickly review the document, you can do a word search and jump from one section of the text to another, without having to manually scroll.
- Correct language consistency. In order to improve the quality of your text, you can search for certain words and evaluate their consistency. Adding synonyms or other variations of the term so that the content you have created is not repetitive.
How to look up words in Word
Knowing and applying this functionality can save you a lot of time and help improve the quality of your texts. So take good note of what you have to do if you want search for a specific term in a Word document and you don't feel like reading the whole thing.
Simple word search
To get started, open the document you want to work with and pay attention to the toolbar. tools that appears at the top. In the right corner you will see a magnifying glass-shaped icon. If you click on it A dialog box opens in which you have to enter the term you want to locate. Another way to access the search drawer is using the Ctrl+ F commands.
When entering the word, the search engine will take us through the text to the first place where it appears, highlighting it in yellow. By clicking on the arrows that appear in the search box, We can move up and down the document to see the different places where we have placed the term we are interested in.
If you want to see in a single pass all the times the searched word appears, click on the three vertically placed dots that appear in the search box. This opens a toolbar on the left side of the screen which shows you the different places in the document where the term appears. By clicking on any of them, you automatically move to that part of the text.
How to search for words in Word with advanced parameters
This that we have seen is the simplest way to locate a term, but you can search with much more precision.
The first option we have is for the search engine to differentiate between upper and lower case when trying to locate a word. In this case, we open the search option toolbar again and click on the magnifying glass-shaped icon.
We indicate the term we want to search for and check the box “Sensitive between upper and lower case” to see only the results in which the word appears written with a capital letter. Thus, if we want to locate the word “green”, but We are only interested in those cases in which it appears written with a capital letter, it will be much easier and faster for us to get to it.
The other search option with advanced parameters is to search only for the entire word. For example, if the combination of letters “de” appears in the text both independently and as part of another word, a simple search will highlight all the cases in which it detects “de” written, whatever it may be.
What this option does is search only for those words that contain the exact term. Following the previous example, what What we achieve with this function is that it locates us only the times in which “de” appears in the text as a determiner, and not as part of words like “thimble”.
To achieve this, we open the search option toolbar again and click on the magnifying glass. We write the word that interests us and click on the “Whole word only” option.
Find and replace a word in Word
When it comes to searching for words in Word, we may want to locate a specific term to replace it with another. For that, we use the “Find and Replace” functionality.
We start by searching for the word that interests us as we have explained. After, In the search toolbox we enter the term we want to replace it with, We click on “Replace with” and the change is made. We can change one word for another just once, or do it at the same time throughout the document if we click on “Replace all”.
Now that you know how to search for words in Word, We hope your work becomes easier and faster. You have already seen that with this method it will only take you a few seconds to make the necessary adjustments.