Microsoft Office and Open Office Tip: Find and Replace Special Characters and Formatting

Microsoft Word and Open Office are not only great Word processor; they are able to perform tasks which most people don’t even know about - which can literally save hours. One of these tasks is the find and replace option:

Find and Replace Special Characters and Formatting

Everyone knows about find and replace. You search a recurring text that you want to change, and replace it with a different text. However, Word and Open Office allow you to replace more than just text. They allow you to replace a documents formatting (bold, italic, superscript, etc…). You can replace all text that is italicized and make it bold or underlined or any combination that you can think of. In fact you can even change all of the numbers in a document into superscripts or subscripts. Great for those chemistry reports! There is an incredible amount of formatting that can be replaced with this feature, so once you finish reading this tutorial on how to use find and replace for formatting, make sure you play around with it a bit:

To replace formatting or special characters in Microsoft Word:

Reach the find and replace window by pressing ctrl-f and then the Replace Tab. On the bottom left, choose the More >> button. This will pop-out more search options, as displayed in the screen shot. Next, click on either the Formatting button or the Special button. Click on these and mess check out what Word has to offer.

Examples:

Make all numbers subscripts:

Select the Find What text field. Click on Special - Any digit. This will place “^#” into the field, which is the keyword that Word uses to define any number.

Select the Replace With text field. Click on Format - Font. Next, check the subscript option.
Click ‘Replace All’. Word will replace all numbers with subscripts.

Change all bold text into underlined:

Select the Find What text field. Click on Format - Font and then the Bold option in ‘Font Style’.
Select the Replace With text field. Click on Format - Font and choose any underline style you want.

To replace formatting or special characters in Open Office:

The process is almost identical to the one with Word. Press ctrl-f and choose the More Options button. Here, you will see the Format button, which will guide you through changing the formatting. You can also right click in the text field and choose Special Characters for choosing text that is not found on the keyboard.

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