Find and Replace Formatting in MS-Word

MS Word packs a large number of amazing features. The other day I was working with a long novel in MS Word. The manuscript was full of formatting done by the writer. She had written some comments at various places and (thankfully) marked them in red color. I wanted to delete all these red colored comments. Going through the entire document looking for red color formatting and then deleting comments one by one was a tedious task. Then I found out how to find formatting and replace it in MS Word document.

If you use MS-Word a lot, sometimes you also must have wished if you could find a particular type of formatting in a long document and then replace it with some other sort of formatting. For example, you may wish to find all the portions of text with bold typeface and change these pieces to italic typeface. Let’s learn how to do it.

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People who are used to with find and replace facility in MS-Word know how to find text and replace it with some other text. But it is indeed possible to find formatting and replace it with other formatting! Here is how you do it:

1. Open the document and press CTRL + H to open the Find and Replace box
2. Click on the More>> button to see more options given in the box
3. Now put your cursor in the Find box
4. Click on the Format button given in the bottom left corner and go to Font option
5. Select the type of formatting you want to find (e.g. you can select Bold typeface)
6. Click OK. And voila! Right under the Find box you will see “Format: Font Bold”
7. If you just want to search for the formatting, click Find Next button. But if you also want to do replacement, proceed to next step.
8. To define replace settings, put the cursor in the Replace box and repeat the above steps to select formatting for replacement.
9. Now, click Replace button to replace formatting one by one or Replace All button to do all the replacement in one go.

That’s it. Isn’t it easy?

I publish a lot of such useful and time saving MS Word tips on TechWelkin. Please let me know if you have any questions about this topic. I will be glad to assist you. Thank you for using TechWelkin.