Accept you lot e'er finishing typing a letter, report or presentation only to notice that yous misspelled a person's proper name or had the wrong company listed multiple times throughout your document? No worries—it's an easy fix. Using Word's Observe and Replace feature, you can quickly locate and replace text. Let's see how information technology works.

Switch over to the "Habitation" tab on Word'due south Ribbon and then click the "Supersede" push button.

This opens Word's Find and Replace window. In the "Observe What" box, type the give-and-take or phrase you want to locate. If you only want to observe text in your document, you lot can go ahead and click the "Notice Next" button to have Discussion jump to the next occurrence of that discussion. Keep clicking information technology to scan through all the results.

If you lot want to replace the text you discover with something else, type the replacement text into the "Replace With" box. You can enter upward to 255 characters in the both the "Notice What" and "Supersede With" boxes, by the style.

In this case, let's say we desire to supplant the name "Williams" with the proper name "Billingsly", and so we've typed that text into the respective boxes. Next, we'd click the "Discover Next" button to take Discussion locate the first case of the text in the "Find What" box.

Word jumps the certificate to that point and highlights the upshot in greyness, still keeping the Notice and Supplant window on tiptop for you. Click the "Replace" button to supervene upon the currently selected outcome with whatsoever text is in the "Supervene upon With" box.

To replace all instances at once without stopping and reviewing each one, you tin can click the "Replace All" button.

Be conscientious when using "Replace All" because information technology will automatically supercede all instances, including those you might non desire to supersede. In the instance below, there are 3 more instances of "Williams," but we only want to supercede the next 2. In this case, we would only click "Replace" for the second and tertiary instance.

If there is a particular instance where you don't want to replace the text, click "Observe Adjacent" equally many times every bit needed until y'all come up to an example where you need to replace text.

To exit from Find and Replace, click the "Cancel" push button.

Of course, since it is Discussion we're talking near hither, there are also lots of other things y'all can practice to make your searches more sophisticated:

  • Use wildcards in your searches to narrow them down to more specific results.
  • Search directly inside Word'southward Navigation pane to have Word bear witness y'all which headings have your search terms included under them.
  • Supplant double spaces between sentences with single spaces.
  • Search for specific formatting or special characters.

The basic of searching and replacing text in Word are pretty straightforward, but at that place'due south a lot you can practise with it once yous get-go digging.

The to a higher place article may comprise affiliate links, which assist support How-To Geek.