How to find and replace text in Word documents
Version 7.2 of ONLYOFFICE Docs brings a new search bar. Now, users are able to find content in a document more comfortably, apply additional options, and navigate through the results. Let’s see how to find and replace text in Word documents.
How to find a word or phrase in Word documents
To find separate words and sentences in a document, click the magnifier icon in the upper right corner or use the key combination Ctrl+F.
In the window that appears at the right on the top, enter the word to find. The results will be highlighted automatically in yellow in the text.
Use the up and down arrows on the search window or the Enter key to jump from one result to the next. In this case, the document will automatically scroll to the place where the specified word or phrase will be found.
You can also view all found results in a list. To do this, click the three dots in the search window. In the left-side toolbar, you will see the Find and replace panel with the results listed. Click them to get straight to the part of the document you want.
How to apply advanced parameters to find text in Word documents
In addition to a simple search, version 7.2 of the ONLYOFFICE editors also offers additional options, like Case sensitive and Whole words only. Let’s see how to use them.
Case sensitive
To launch the search panel with additional options, click the magnifier icon in the left-side toolbar.
Then, enter the phrase in the Find field in the panel that appears as previously. At this step, you will already have all the results that match your search in the list below. However, the results match other occurrences of that word or phrase, regardless of their case in the source document and regardless of how the word is spelled.
Check the Case sensitive box to exclude options that don’t match what you entered.
For example, we entered the word Rooms with a capital letter. The initial search returned all the words that match “room” in the results. Next, we check Case sensitive, and we get only those variants that start with a capital letter.
Whole word only
One more additional option is to use Whole word only. In this case, the results will only include the characters you entered, surrounded by spaces or punctuation marks. For example, if the letter combination “the” occurs both in a word and separately as an article. If you apply this option, you will see only articles found. Let’s see how it works in action.
Go to the left-side toolbar as in the previous step. Type a necessary word in the Find field and check Whole word only. That’s it.
How to find and replace content
Sometimes you may need to replace one term with another in the whole text or several parts. Rereading the text and making manual corrections can take a lot of time and effort. In addition, a mistake due to loss of concentration cannot be ruled out. This is where the Find and Replace function can help you.
Replace a separate word
First, find the words you need in the text as described above. From the search results, find the sentence where you want to replace the word and click it.
Then, enter the correct word or term in the Replace with field and click Replace with. After that, the word will be replaced by a new one in the text automatically.
Replace all search results
Also, you can replace all the words in the text with another in just a few clicks. To do this, after performing the search, enter the correct word in the Replace with field and click Replace All.
You will see information about the number of results found and replaced.
Try the Find and replace option and other updated features in ONLYOFFICE:
