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Text editing: Find and replace

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To get started finding and replacing words and terms in your documents, go to the Edit menu and select Find and replace, or press Ctrl + F. You can press Command + F on a Mac.

If you want to stop seeing the 'Find and replace' toolbar, simply click the 'x' on the top right of the toolbar. When you come back to the document, you'll have to re-open the menu.

Finding words

To simply find a word or term in your document, type it in the first search box, to the right of 'Find what,' and click Find next. If that word doesn't appear in the document, you'll see the message 'No matches found' in red font to the right of toolbar.

Additional options for finding words

To access any of these options, click the arrow button to the right of the first search box to open the drop-down menu.

  • Match case and match whole words:
    • To search for words that match the exact case you type in, select Match case.
    • To find only whole words instead of part of words, select Match whole words.
    • If you select both Match case and Match whole words, both cases will have to be met for the word to be found.
  • Regular expression-style matching: To learn more about this, click ? next to this option.
  • Previous word: To find the previous instance of a word or term found in your document, select Find previous, and click the Find previous button that appears. You can also press 'Ctrl+shift+G.

Finding and replacing

  • To replace a word or expression in your document, type the text you'd like to replace in the box next to 'Replace with' and then click the Replace button.
  • If you'd like to replace all the selected words, click the Replace all button.
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